Moving in the Divine Two-Step
Let me offer a further quotation from Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, remembering
that humans do not tend to get invested in things unless those things somehow
include them:
God does not offer Himself to our finite beings as a thing all
complete and ready to be embraced. For us, He is eternal discovery
and eternal growth. The more we think we understand Him, the
more he reveals himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold
him, the further He withdraws, drawing us into the depths of
himself.*5This so fits my own experience of God. The divine-human love affair really is a
reciprocal dance. Sometimes, in order for us to step forward, the other partner
must step a bit away. The withdrawal is only for a moment, and its purpose is to
pull us toward him or her—but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. It feels
like our partner is retreating. Or it just feels like suffering.
God creates the pullback too, “hiding his face” as it was called by so many
mystics and Scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God
waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us,
which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central
theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics called “God
withdrawing his love.” They knew that what feels like suffering, depression,
uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—these moments are often
deep acts of trust and invitation to intimacy on God’s part. (That this is so
poorly understood was revealed when the world was shocked to discover that
Mother Teresa had many years of darkness and what looked to the secular
world like depression. It was anything but.)
I must be honest with you here about my own life. For the last ten years I
have had little spiritual “feeling,” neither consolation nor desolation. Most days,
I’ve had to simply choose to believe, to love, and to trust. The simple kindness
and gratitude of good people produces a momentary “good feeling” in me, but
even this goodness I do not know how to hold on to. It slides off my