Dark Light, 8.10.2007

The most common and well known understanding among the Christians is, that God is an active creator, loving father who wants to communicate with us. But does God have to talk to us, and does he have to talk to us the way we think he should talk to us?

Silence is one form of communication. Bible gives us numerous accounts of painful human experience about God not answering. It is not uncommon for a Christian to experience a period of spiritual dryness. However, what I have in my mind now is still something else than that: what if God chooses to send you to a road which is permanently characterized by such attributes as silence and absence?

Some Christians very rarely get any concrete prayer answers. Some people have great difficulties hearing about other people’s positive spiritual experiences. They may not bother very deeply when things are otherwise all right – until one is taken to a place where suddenly everything is lost and gone, and life is in pieces – and same thing repeats itself: the things just don’t come together no matter how fiercly you pray. You are still left without God’s help, but this is not a game any more, this is something very serious. At those times, it is impossible to relate to that biblical image of active, communicating God. It is also impossible to get any help or consolation from other people’s experience about active God. God is not the one you can love easily any more, he is not the one who pours out his gifts for you, he is not the loving father you used to know. God has become an enemy to you.

We can endure and survive anything if only we have the experience that God is with us in our pain, that he is carrying us through it all. The hell breaks lose, when God leaves us alone in the suffering, and that can happen, too.

This is a very important, and very genuine and divine experience of God. In all this, it can be so, that we have just begun traveling on the road towards silent God, but this road is a place where we are invited to let it go. On this road, we are invited to let go our false image of God, that small God whom we think must talk to us, whom we cen define easily, who is predictable and whom we can manipulate through our prayers. This is a painful road towards something else, and it is a road where we are taken away our understanding of God – but here comes the miracle: when our image or understanding of God is taken away and wiped off, it somehow strangely does not rob our faith to God. When we have been made to give up our false image of God – when we are taken to place where we are asked to become non-believers – then two things happen: firstly, we come to realise how restricted and narrow our image of God has been. The picture of active, communicating, succesful, healing God probably does not reflect all the aspects of God who truly exists. Secondly, this painful experience does not only make us thoroughly naked first, but it will teach us to know a different kind, great yet mysterious God. Losing faith can renew the faith.

In Christian tradition, there are two spiritual roads: via positiva, the positive road, and via negativa, the negative road. If I simplify it: via positiva is the road where we travel together with loving, active, powerful and communicative God, whose presence is experienced as comforting and very real. People who travel on via positiva, are somehow very lucky ones. But via negative represents God whose presence is sensed as non-presence, and whose voice is heard as a silence. God has laid his hand on your head but it is a heavy, silent and crushing hand, not comforting nor seemingly blessing.

Via negativa is not very much know among Christians. We very rarely describe God as Silence, we are much more familiar with words such as a Shepherd, Father, King, Healer and Redeemer. They are all expressions that belong to via positiva, but to someone who has been taken to travel on via negativa, they seem and they feel quite remote, empty and cold. Christians in general have more or less neglected via negativa, or have never even known about it in the first place. We have not dared to build our theology or spirituality on God’s silence – that is perhaps because number of great spiritual teachers such as John of the Cross have had the opinion that via negativa is a secret, and most of us are meant to travel on via positiva. And those who are meant to travel via negativa, but are mistakenly directed to via positiva, always feel somehow odd and never really figure out why is it that I never feel easy when people talk about how God answers to them. It is not uncommon that in those situations, people blame the weakness of their faith when failing to encounter an active God, when as a matter of fact they should have been told that perhaps you are meant for via negativa, not via positiva. And it definitely is not about the quantity of faith that is the issue here.

Suffering, lack of love of God, his absence etc may be the indicators that we are being directed to via negativa. Noboby wants to suffer, nor does God want us to suffer, nor does he cause our sufferings. Suffering does not make us any better nor noble, it does not even necessarily teach us anything. Suffering in general is a consequence of fall of sin when the creation was still new, and there is nothing noble in it. Suffering is simply horrible, but it belongs to the world and it belongs to us.

Suffering can, however, lead us towards a more prayerful life – but what does God do to turn suffering into grace? What does he do to help us? Now comes the hard part: he continues being silent, and that is the whole point in this: if he came to resque us immediately, it would of course take the suffering away – no, he does not do it, but he continues being silent in order suffering to be suffering.

God is silent, does not respond. We are rejected, thoroughly hopeless and we have no prayer left. We rebel, in case there is any energy left for that. Doesn´t he care for me any more? The stronger our faith in him has been, the more devastating is our disappointment. The next challenge is to give up all the expectations and demands, that God should help us. We simply must stop demanding nor expecting anything from him. And then, only then, things start to change: God’s silence starts talking to us. Little by little, silence becomes meaningful. Step by step, God embraces our wounded hearts and broken souls - and silence which was so devastating, becomes filled by grace. There´s still no words nor replies nor prayer answers, but there’s a silence that is not crushing any more but healing. We get a notion that through pain and sorrow we are about to enter into the deepest secret of God’s love, the miracle of Easter morning. We begin to trust God, only because he is who he is, and our relationship to him gets built on the faith that he has granted to us – it is not built on some image of him we have developed – because that was taken away already.

Via negativa is a road where we are called to let it go all the time – to let go also all those expectations we have towards God. Our fault often is that we love gifts more the we love the Giver. Via negativa takes away everything else and leaves only God. Via negativa cleanses our prayer. As John of the Cross says: to own everything, your must lose everything. To become saved, you need to die first – and this is really hard for us to accept both in our own case or in someone else’s case. If someone has the experience that God does not talk, it is not a fault, it is not a deficiency nor sin, and it does not indicate lack of faith. If we see it happening around ourselves, in other people, we must not try to fix it. We simply have to resepct the fact that someone is being directed towards via negativa. It is a holy road.

White Light 1.10.2007

White Light, 1.10.2007

When I wake up on Sunday mornings, I wake up into white light. Firstly, because on Sundays we can sleep in and day is already there when I open my eyes. Secondly, our bedroom is all white: white curtains, white carpets, white tablecloths, white mosquito net, white beddings. It is exactly as I want it to be. And when we have three large windows, nearly 7 meters of them altogether, you can´t stop the sunlight from pouring in with its all potential. Light and sun is never the same in Finland as it is here.

Sleeping in a white bedroom and waking up in a white light is not only what I want, but is also what I need. I am a notorious dreamer: my nightlife is often so wild, actionful, sometimes so dark that it gets nearly morbid, at times exhausting and awful – as if all my inner life is put on display in my nightly dreams. And of course this is excatly what it is – whatever happened the previous day, whatever problems I am having, whatever plans or happenings are there, I repeat or pre-live that all in my dreams. Nightmares – just name the genre, I know it.

I thirst for light. It seems only in Africa I can have it enough. When my inner world is dark, the outer world and all its light keeps me alive and breathing. Sometimes the rays of light come unexpectedly. One of those rare moments I experienced one day last week. I was busy and also to some extend burdened by the coming management team meeting, by my coming travel to Ilembula, not the mention sorting out the theft of our luggage in Dar es Salaam port. In one instant, I just felt huge happiness and gratitude for all this: that I can live here, work here, even sense the burden of work and all other problems that are so inevitable here. The short experience of light, lightness and gratitude was overwhelming and left me longing for more.