Why Do The Gods Mess With Our Heads?
I wrote last week about the importance of what might be called, spiritual disappointment. Since then, I have found myself reflecting further on why we do, or do not, set out on a spiritual journey and why we do, or do not, continue on across our life span. In last weeks article I mentioned how I had felt compelled to pick up C S Lewis stunning, but little-known allegory, Till We Have Faces[1], having read it twice before, decades ago. I have learned to listen to these strange ‘promptings’ about books I should read or re-read and I have never been disappointed.
For a while I have felt a growing curiosity regarding what led a generation of my peers, some who were effective evangelists, teachers, pastors and youth workers, to give up on God. Entirely. Relievedly (not sure that’s a word!). Their old faith experiences, like a photo album, now sit in the attic like forgotten, dust- gathering curios, that will probably never see the light of day again.
But why?
Let’s widen the discussion. Did you ever have a moment where you sensed something beyond, deeper, unexplainable, than the physical, measurable world you inhabit? Maybe it was a moment of looking with speechless awe at the Alps, for the first time, or standing on the edge of a vast ocean, or holding the miracle of a baby in your hands, or maybe even a sense of light or hope in the darkest time of your life that you’d ever experienced. In a moment, you had a glimpse through the thin veil of awe and wonder, beauty, love, pain, of something ‘other’. Above and beyond your usual senses; you have touched something inside of you and outside of you that is unexplainable.
In my late teens I certainly had two very real spiritual experiences. I wasn’t in a church and I didn’t come from an overtly Christian background. My dad was an ardent atheist and only a few friends professed to be of faith. The experiences I had arrested me and it is true to say, they changed me and changed the direction of my life. I wrote last week about some of what followed.
But as I reflect on my own journey and that of many peers, who also told me of their experiences, I am wondering still why we each took the roads we took. As I look back, I find myself asking questions about my unexplainable experiences.
“Were they true?”
“Did they really happen?”
“Did I invent them?”
(It wasn’t psychedelics)
“Was it my best act of rebellion against an atheistic dad?”
These experiences weren’t just limited to then. I’ve had moments, very real unexplainable experiences since my youth, where it felt like the hand of someone was intimately guiding me and yet in the very next moment…silence.
Nothing!
Like that thing never happened.
In Till We Have Faces, Orual, has such a moment. It would take too long here to explain the whole story…so go read the book. In short, Orual is in a mountain valley seeking to meet her half-sister, the god-like Psyche. When they finally meet, Psyche describes this beautiful city she now lives in with her lover. But Orual can’t see it. They were having a fully adult, person to person conversation, but it becomes clear that they are experiencing two different worlds. For Orual it’s a grassy bank on a mountain side and for Psyche it is the beautiful castle and city. Orual thinks Psyche has gone mad. She just can’t see the world as Psyche is seeing it. In the end frustration between them ends the conversation and Orual goes back over the river to find Bardia, her minder.
In the dawn of the next morning, just before sunrise, Orual gets up, too disturbed to sleep. She walks down the river’s edge where she’d crossed over the previous day to meet Psyche, but the valley is blanketed in mist. As Orual stands there the mist clears for a moment. Suddenly, she is overwhelmed by the sight before her. Now she can clearly see Psyche’s mesmerising city! It was everything Psyche had described. She is transfixed. However, within moments the thick mist rolls back in and obscures the city. There is one last brief instance where she sees the mist reduce enough to glimpse what looked like the city walls, but then it disappeared completely.
Gone!
Orual is left with the very questions we are thrown into, when we look honestly and open mindedly and open heartedly at our own unexplainable, confusing, transcendent experiences.
“Was it real?”
“Did that really happen?”
“Why was it so fleeting and how can I get it back?
“Is there a hidden dimension to what I can see before my eyes, that is always seemingly just out of reach, but nonetheless real?
Let’s hear what Orual’s honest, frustrated response was.
“There is a divine mockery in it (in these moments).
The gods set these riddles and then allow the possibility
of a reality that can’t be tested and can only quicken
and thicken the tormenting whirlpool of your guess work”.
And her cry, is my cry…
“If the gods had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain?”
Isn’t this the cry of almost everyone who asks the God-question at some point in their life? “If there is a divine personal presence, why don’t they just make it plain?”
The philosophical novel Maya[2], by the wonderful Jostein Gaarder (author of Sophie’s World) writes poignantly,
“If there’s a god, he is not only a wizard at leaving clues behind him. More than anything, he’s a master of concealment…..The heavens keep their secret”
Orual is caught in her own inner battle about what to do with her experience.
“If what I saw was real, I was in great fear of it; but perhaps it was not real”
And we, like Orual are left,
standing “on my feet, the whole thing having vanished…
and I was simply staring at the fog”
Of course we can explain it all away. There are a hundred ways and reasons for doing so. It’s the easiest tool in the toolbox of life to reach for. Many have had these experiences and many, many people have rejected them, because they too, like Orual, felt it was divine mockery, an unsolvable riddle.
“Did I see it? Did I not see it?”
Again,
“If the gods had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain?’
Orual does what many of my friends did over time. Shamed the experience. Pain and confusion and bad experiences won over faith. They put it all in a box labelled ‘nostalgia’ and put the box in the attic, got logical, got busy, got stuff, did life, forged something meaningful out of it all. They told you at a school reunion, or a dinner party of old friends, that God is dead, which silences and numbs those past experiences. I must have been duped. Caught up in nonsense. Move on. Nothing to see here. The end of a disappointing and painful, slightly embarrassing chapter.
But it is the underlying anger that gives the lie to it all.
It is so, so easy to be angry about the unsolved perplexities and riddles of these past experiences. They are angry at themselves for believing the lie, angry with their past because of all the good and reasonable reasons people give to dismiss their experiences – the abuses, the shallow logic, the immaturity, the naivety, the ignorance.
But…
Anger is not nothing.
Anger is not an emotion of the dead, but of the living.
Anger has life in it, energy…a lot of it.
Anger is a sign of life, not death.
It was anger that drove Orual, even after years of supressing her experiences deep underground, that leads her, at the end of the story, to demand, yes demand, an audience with the gods to state her case against them.
It was in that raging that her face transformed into a beautiful woman.
What I appreciate most about C S Lewis in this book, is how he writes like an elder. There are no explanations, no preaching or positioning, but he models. He models how he made a space within himself for such a vast range of feelings.
A space big enough, not to house dogma, but a dilemma.
A space big enough to own questions, own rage, own feelings of being messed about and a sense of being mocked, in order to let them drive him to make an angry case to the gods. And it is in that very process that maybe, just maybe, we find our more beautiful, original face.
It’s worth remembering that when C S Lewis wrote this book he had just fallen passionately in love with a woman who was dying of cancer. Joy Davidman died just over two years after it was published. He had much to rage about.
[1] C S Lewis Till We Have Faces HBJ 1957
[2] Jostein Gaarder Maya 2001 Phoenix Books