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Darkness · Jan 7, 04:06 PM

“Despair and die, for God is not with thee. All is in vain. Death, not Life, is thy refuge. Make haste to Hades, where thy torture will be over. Thou hast deceived thyself. He never was with thee. He was the God of Abraham. Abraham is dead. Whom makest thou thyself?”

I have been wandering through the archives of A Catechumen’s Walk. The author is “a Protestant who has fallen in love with sacraments and liturgy.” She writes about her father,

One of my greatest fears is that I will end up where he is; everyone says I am exactly like him. He is older now, but sometimes I can see his youthful religious zeal when I talk about it. He is still searching as desperately as I am, but has given up; he goes to church to hear a man speak, and to drink grape-juice and eat bread. He knows he is not home, but I don’t know if he can still change. I fear I may become like that; settle down into something I know to be heterodoxical because I am too worn and sore from the search. [link]

Mark Twain quips, “A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking,” and I think I grok his idea. Conviction—be it religious, agnostic, or atheist—is something that other people get to enjoy. The repeated alienation and unsatisfaction I find everywhere really, um, gets me down.

The Internet Monk is an evangelical Christian who suffers similar doubt, and George Macdonald has written some relevant words:

Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of us, when all consciousness of well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, when man nor woman shall delight us more, nay, when God himself shall be but a name, and Jesus an old story, then, even then, when a Death far worse than “that phantom of grisly bone” is griping at our hearts, and having slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Nor shall we die then, I think, without being able to take up his last words as well, and say, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

That is the conclusion of his sermon on The Eloi (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), which is part of his Unspoken Sermons, First Series. Earlier in that sermon, he spoke more directly about Jesus on the cross.

… Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is “My God” that he cries.

Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. …

The first quote, by the way, is also from Macdonald’s sermon.

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