And Furthermore...

Michele said my last post just kind of stopped mid rant.  It never did really "drive home" I suppose, because I got to that part about certainty, because it was Sunday afternoon, my brain was just about toasted, and that seemed like a decent enough insight for one afternoon.  But I also trailed off because I was about to get to something really rather painful that relates to that insight.  Namely that it is an insight, not something I was born knowing; I have learned that in order to save your life you must lose it.  In order to be humble before God you need to stop telling him all of the things you think you know.
At one point, I thought I knew a lot about God, I was flush with knowledge and theological insight, and I thought that being right with God was just being right about God.  I had entirely compartmentalized my experience of God as the sort of character that comes and finds a strung out college student who had been determinedly anesthetizing themselves for months, from the God that I had learned about in Seminary.  I was full of thoughts about covenant, and grace, and revelation, and doctrine, and the historical origins and development of doctrines, and I was trying to apply all those things to the rather peculiar vocation of being a pastor in a small town, and really, if I'm honest, I thought I had it all figured out.
Then my brother died.
And a whole bunch of stuff I thought I knew about God got picked up and put in the blender.
I had spent a lot of time and energy, thinking about and working through this cultural/countercultural dance that Christianity is waltzing through right now.  I had ideas about "biblical" standards, and would engage, a bit too enthusiastically, in debates about homosexuality, or the nature and person of Jesus, or biblical interpretation, and have absolutely no reservations that I might actually be wrong, or not have thought things through, because I had thought them through, or I thought I had thought them through.
The dark night of the soul that was described by John of the Cross was a theory until that moment, then it became undeniably real.  At least in one way: whenever I tried to access the nature of this pain through the lens of intellect, I got nothing, God was entirely absent.  The Deity that had seemed so compelling during my theological education refused to make an appearance.  But I can't say that God was absent, it's just that the God who kept showing up was the rather less impressive God who had sat on the edge of my dorm room bunk with me years ago, before seminary, before being a reverend, before I knew so damn much about everything.  Some of you might know this God, the One who shows up and listens to all your questions and your anger and sits there while you rant and rave without really saying or doing a whole lot.
The dialogue goes something like this:
"Why don't you do something about this?" you ask, perhaps shouting.
"I am doing something," God replies.
"What are  you doing?"
"Sitting here with you."
"Is that it?"
"What else do you want?"

It's rather infuriating... and also the only thing that helps even a little bit.  There are no deep secrets of the universe bandied about.  Doctrine and dogma have absolutely no meaning, the only thing that matters is presence.
I guess I'm kind of thick headed, because I always forget this about God, until something really bad goes down.  I got another reminder when I had to deal with a man killing his wife and little girls.  I had counseled the couple, I had emptied my therapeutic and spiritual toolbox into them, and yes I had prayed, we had prayed together, we were not just doing psychotherapy in a church.  I thought I had done the best I could, but the problem was bigger than me.  I had to come to the conclusion, as I had when Jon died, that sometimes evil wins.
I really expected to stand in front of the casket of those two little girls and utterly lose my faith... it was terrifying because I would then have to climb into a pulpit and be the reverend again.  I shouldn't have worried.  I should have known He would be there.
Not the god of good communication practices and therapeutic counseling.
Not the god of why bad things happen to good people.
Not the god of answers and certainty.
It was the God who will sit at the edge of the void with you and say absolutely nothing.
That is the God who is worth knowing.
That is the God who has saved me from dissolution and destruction.
That is the God who has saved me from being a self-righteous prick.
That is the God who has saved me from thinking I can do it on my own.
That is the God who has saved me from emptiness and futility.
That is the only God I ever want to talk about.