Friday, April 23, 2010

God and the Abyss

I gave this as a public testimony in chapel this morning.

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ~Nietzsche

“Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed.” ~Psalm 34:9

I grew up in the Bible belt city of Jacksonville, FL, in a charismatic and fundamentalist church, in public school classrooms, in the fantasy world of books, in the virtual world of video games and movies. I came to faith in Jesus Christ at the depraved age of six, having responded to multiple children’s church altar calls just to make sure it stuck. At 7 my parents separated; dad moved out and left the rearing business to my mom. I spent the bulk of my young life in the company of women, especially my mom, sister and grandmother. I saw dad on weekends, usually no more than five or six hours any given Saturday. I tested, I humbly submit, above average on standardized tests at a young age. At school I excelled, breezing unchallenged through my elementary years with high grades and the favor of teachers who love to dote on precocious wunderkinds. At church I squirmed restlessly during children’s services until my first early experiences with the Holy Spirit. These first occurred in strength when I was about 10.

The sum total of these experiences was not a well-adjusted preteen with trust for family or society to show the way to a stable path through life. Rather, this confused, imaginative, extroverted, isolated child experience a deep sense of anomie or not-fitting-in. He had no sense of what it mean to be a man or want to be a man. And his church’s vitriol against the dangers of Darwin, Clinton and the academy forced a false choice between reason and faith, mind and spirit. Books, videogames and movies provided a regular escape from the painful mental and emotional chaos of life; my favorites drew me out of my secure yet unhappy life and away to the dangerous joys of Narnia’s northern moors, Final Fantasy’s empire-imperiled kingdoms and Endor’s tall forests. These fictions, like twin suns setting over a far horizon, teased the Tatooine-esque desert of my isolation with the hint of something more exciting and less senseless.

The onset of adolescence meant the discovery of sexuality and critical thought within the same year. Body and mind both chafed under the strictures of Christian morality, and a holiness at home opposed to magic and violence constantly conflicted with the desire to explore as many fictional and virtual worlds as I could. It was when faith threatened to separate me from my closest friend, however, that I was finally willing to abdicate the confession of childhood for the prospect of claiming an identity and social life of my own. I put God away and decided to do my own thing, though I kept my apostasy hidden from mother’s watchful eye. Her strict religious oversight caged, stifled, frustrated and protected me all at one. Far and away the bulk of my rebellion consisted of salty language, contraband entertainment and godless friends—a functionally, if not eternally, tame set of vices.

The loss of God meant the loss of a life narrative, of any sense of direction or purpose. This sunk in as I struggled through my first two and a half years of high school, where I fared well enough academically but often waded through bouts with depression. Walking away from faith solved no problems other than my desire to imagine myself in alternate worlds as often as possible, a practice unhelpful to the growth of emotional and social maturity. The more I looked into myself, the more I looked at the world, the more Nietzsche’s abyss looked back into me and I sank progressively deeper into hopelessness.

During Lent in 2001, I began waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning every single night. Many nights I could not fall asleep again. I wasn’t disturbed, I wasn’t sick. Yet, night after night, I rolled over to read the red digital readout: 3:00.

Good Friday 2001, roughly three quarters of the way through my junior year of high school, I was forced to attend a charismatic worship and prayer meeting by my mom. I should interject at this point to add that, through these years, that my mom was not only a source of moral frustration, but also the sole breadwinner of our family, forced to play both nurturer and provider, and constantly in prayer for myself and my sister as well as the children she ministered to weekly in a downtown project. I’ve no doubt that her prayers kept me safe from unknown and unseen dangers and that the next part of the story was an answer to many of them. At that worship meeting, I sat off to the side and mulled over my hopelessness as well as the God-encounters I remembered from my youth. At one point the worship leader began talking about prodigal sons returning home yet I paid little attention. Then he said, “You’ve been waking up at 3 in the morning and you don’t know why.”

I had a choice to make. The abyss had proven a dark reality more powerful and crushing than any literary or visual fiction could escape. It had nothing to offer but senselessness and death. God, on the other hand, would not let me forget his entreaties to me as a child, and now he made a clear, irrefutable gesture of peace and love in my direction. I had nothing to lose but the petty freedoms of my selfishness. I confessed Jesus as Lord once again, and the Holy Spirit stirred within me powerfully. Though there have been mountains and there have been valleys, I have not looked back since.

I find this to be true: when I turn my thoughts, hopes, prayers and time toward God I am at peace and can cope with life’s challenges. When I avert my gaze, the abyss still waits to swallow me up: the path is indeed narrow. Like the psalmist says, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night.” Not that I ever fear the loss of my justification, but rather that I have learned that yes, God’s path is narrow, but it is a good path, and he is the king.

2 comments:

Rachel Dawn Kornfield said...

Wow, Babe, no wonder people responded so positively to your chapel message. It brought tears to my eyes. Very powerful, very insightful, and something that almost anyone, despite the diversity of our life stories, can connect with. Thank you for sharing, and for inspiring me to read it. I'm sorry in one way that I didn't get to it sooner, but in some ways it seems especially propitious that I read it at this moment, when I promised to be in prayer for you, as it certainly aided that process!

Rachel Dawn Kornfield said...

Oh my word! This was written in April 2010! Haha! I opened it while intending to open the home page of your site and read your LAST chapel message in February 2011! Now I REALLY feel like God guided me here :). Blessings, Babe!