Does God Still Love Me?

The girls in our house got hit with a nasty flu bug the past week or so. Pretty much coincidentally with the arrival of the flu came the first of the contractors. We're putting an addition on to my in-laws' house to accommodate the six of us as a multi-generational family. Let me tell you that having someone drilling into the slab under your feet when your head is already about to explode and you're running a temperature of 102 or so (which we all did for five or six days) -- well, let's just say it's not exactly helpful.

Somewhere last weekend, when Doe had already missed six days of school and was feeling well enough to start climbing the walls, Ray got a nosebleed. I know a bloody nose is no big deal, and a respiratory infection is enough to set one off -- but I can't recall either of my kids ever having one. So the poor kid is sitting there watching yet another Dora the Explorer video, when all of a sudden, her nose starts gushing. It took a couple of minutes, but it was under control soon enough.

A bit later, she decides she wanted to take a bath. Good idea, I realize when I take off her pajama top and there is a line of dried blood down her chest. So she splashes away, and even lets me wipe the rest of the crusties off her face. Just as I pull her out and wrap her in a towel, she looks at me plaintively: "Mommy, does God still love me?"

"Of course he does, honey." I rush to assure her. "Did you think because you had a bloody nose that God didn't love you anymore? He loves you no matter what." I went on in that vein for some time.

After a bit, she comes back with "You mean God is always with me, no matter where I go?"

"Yes, dear." Crisis of four-year-old faith averted.

It's hard to tell exactly where a question like that comes from. I really doubt it's juvenile theodicy -- why is God allowing me to feel so bad? (That might have been the question I was asking by that point in the week.) As I've reflected on what might have been going on in her mind, it seems more like this is the first time Ray has experienced her body doing something out of the range of "normal" -- indeed something rather alarming. There was a definite sense of "not right" about the experience, and of course, the wariness of wondering what might set it off again. If I'm not all right within myself, am I still all right with God? It seems like a natural question for a child who has always been cherished and safe to ask.

Ray's question forces me to wonder how often my faith -- the actual, lived experience of faith, not what I say I believe -- boils down to a very similar question. Does God still love me when I don't seem to love myself much, or live up to any of my expectations, or find it hard to follow through in any area of my life? Does God really love me when I'm depressed? There is some place inside that knows God is with me, no matter the wilderness I'm traveling through. But closer to the surface, where I decide how to answer those "how are you doing?" questions or what to risk with new friends, a different set of beliefs takes over -- the ones that say it's important to be competent and successful and not show weakness. The ones that say God won't love me if I'm not all right.

A few weeks ago I found myself walking along the beach on a Sunday morning. The sense of being in a place of spiritual exile was overwhelming. I picked up a couple of stones -- just random beach rocks that caught my eye. At the end of the beach I wandered out among the low tide puddles and pitched them into the surf. A dozen years ago, I stood on a rocky beach on Catalina Island and threw stones into the same Pacific Ocean -- one for each of the children whose death I had attended during a chaplaincy internship at Children's Hospital. It was a way of naming and grieving and letting go of the tragedy and senselessness of each loss. This time, the rocks stood for dead ends, for roads in the life of faith that I'd come to the end of, and needed to acknowledge, abandon and move on from.

It's hard to give those dead ends simple names -- maybe they all boil down to the same thing in the end -- but they had to do with feeling like my own spiritual growth is up to me and my efforts, the false promise that going through the motions of a daily devotional will bear fruit even though I know my head and heart take an hour or two to quiet down these days, and the guilt that comes from deciding not to bother after decades of indoctrination.

I've been rereading a book I first encountered a decade ago, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden C. Lane. I remember being slightly disappointed the first time I read it. What struck me the second time around was how completely I had missed his point of exploring the apophatic tradition. In the first chapter, he describes his experience not only of studying the writers in the tradition of desert spirituality, but of practicing some of their wisdom through encounters with wild landscapes.

One might imagine that in pretending to be a desert monk in the city my goal is to achieve particular states of desert consciousness. But the long-standing insistence of the tradition is that there is no "experience," no achievement of "consciousness" be to sought in any of this. The desert practice of contemplative prayer abandons, on principle, all experiences of God or the self. It simply insists that being present before God, in a silence beyond words, is an end in itself.

That's something I would have skimmed over and not even noticed misunderstanding on first reading. The experience of God with all the thrills and chills of charismatic practice was still too fresh to even acknowledge that there could be a place on the roadmap of faith that would voluntarily set those aside for mere silence. I considered myself a contemplative, but somewhere I read of Thomas Merton chiding his fellow monks, telling them they weren't contemplatives, but merely introverts. I dabbled with lectio, but only so long as I got a "word" every time.

Now, having come to the end of the road in terms of working it up, or beating myself up for not working it up, having encountered a wilderness that is genuinely dark and threatening, the idea of something beyond experience begins to make sense. There is precious little silence in my immediate environment right now, but I can at least picture a place of silence. My first question might just be little Ray's question: Does God still love me? To seek out that silence, to sit there exposed and empty, is to answer at least with a mustard seed of faith, yes.