…Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
I tried to put some of these thoughts to c. (his brother) this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?
Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘ so there’s no God after all,’ but ‘so this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’
…. You never know how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?... Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t….
Bridge players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
… the more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness…
This is where he comes out of it – where he learns the secret:
.. Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks…It was as if the listing of the sorrow removed a barrier…
Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I mjight have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.
Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.
You can’t in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyways, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now!
Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘ I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’
don’t get. Perhaps can’t.
And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
On the other hand, “Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does this knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there is also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
[FONT="] For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him. Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) at her elbow, demanding her attention. And of course, not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in – I know how one puts it off – and faced Him. But the message (was not a burden) the message was ‘I want to give you something’ and instantly she entered into joy….[/FONT]
