16/08/2016

H,

The “dark and alone soil of God” is the very fulcrum of our spiritual growth. Adversity is the catalyst for our attempt at the sublime and the beautiful depths of grace. Ease is not. There is something about the human spirit that must be tested by contrary forces to really shine out. We are not made for inertia. We need to work our bodies to be fit and also work our minds to be sharp. It follows that our spirits come alive when we face the contrary, the adversarial, the negative and the nihilistic. We struggle against the tide because we know on some other level that there has to be an answer for the absurdity of this present life.

Now, this might seem like a call to arms for humanist ideals. It is not. The ‘weak’ in this situation do not merely call out to others to be better so we can all have peace. He or she also calls out for the inner human, including an internal inventory of one’s own state, to find something worth building peace around. Poverty and prosperity cannot answer the real hungers of the human soul. Neither can anything else but the resolution of our ideas about God. If we are cut off from source then to feel complete again we need to return to source. I do not think that anyone not at this stage of blissful exasperation and spiritual starvation, the great “something really important is missing in my life”, can ever fully become a Christian. And if you are not fully a Christian then you are not one at all. It is not a moral turn from being off to being on to the moral sphere of existence. It is a martial cry for the soul to be well and good and full in spite of the crippling evidence that there is only darkness ahead.

This murky picture I paint is also part of the dark soil. To even contemplate God is to be with Him. Christianity is not just another attempt at religion but the bold declaration that “this is who God is, this is how He lives and this is what He says”. It is the great finding of the way after the momentous dark of everyday life.

This realisation may come after ten days or ten years of contemplation. Both are valid response to a call from the start of time for us to embrace eternity. No one sees the same thing in the dark soil, feels the same way, climbs the same height or reaches the same depth in experience. We all see parts of Him and tell each other. This is true community and communion.

Yet, it is the same decision we all make. To look at the source and not at our own excuses for turning away in search of storied but temporary solutions to the eternal problem of the human soul.