Journey Through the Wall
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, prt. 4
Wildwind Community Church
October 31, 2010
David Flowers
Ever heard or used the phrase, “I’ve hit the wall”? What does it mean when people say that? (solicit audience reaction) It means, “I have gone as far as I can go.” “I’ve got nothing left.” “I’m done.” “I’m exhausted,” or “I’m a mess” or “I can’t take it anymore.”
Any or all of these phrases are perfectly appropriate when we apply them to the spiritual life. It is well known that what is called “the wall” or what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul” is part of the journey. The wall is one of the least-often preached about aspects of the spiritual life. I suspect this is because it’s something people don’t want to hear about. There are two primary reasons people embark upon the spiritual path. The first reason, and the one we all begin with, is to have a place to stand – to know what is right and what is wrong, which way is up and which way is down, who is in and who is out, and to be confident that they are in fact part of the in group. The other reason is to know God. I know. We all start out on the spiritual journey thinking that we’re seeking God, and in some small way we really are. But twenty years down the road, you can tell who was seeking security and rightness and in-ness and who was seeking God. The first group will have either lost their faith entirely, or else they will have grown increasingly rigid, increasingly harsh with themselves and with others, and increasingly legalistic. The second group, most likely, will have grown in faith, grown in love, grown in ways that have expanded them and not shrunk them down. The only way this can happen is if a person hits the wall and goes through it. The wall separates the men from the boys, so to speak, in terms of the spiritual life.
The wall is out there for every person of faith. It’s waiting for you. It’s not a question of whether you will hit the wall, only a question of when, and what will bring you to it. It’s different for everybody, but you nearly always come to the wall as the result of something happening to you that seems too big for your faith. In other words, you arrive at the wall through a crisis of some kind. Scazzero lists a few in Chapter 5 of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Divorce, job loss, death of a close friend/family member, diagnosis with a chronic or terminal disease, a betrayal, a shattered dream, a wayward child, a car accident, inability to get pregnant, a deep desire to marry that remains unfulfilled, etc. It will vary from person to person, but Scazzero goes on to say that what happens in this moment of crisis is that we discover for the first time that our faith does not appear to “work.” We have more questions than answers, and the very foundation of our faith feels like it is on the line. We don’t know where God is, what he is doing, where he is going, how he is getting us there, or when this will be over. And I will add to Scazzero’s excellent observations that often we will not know whether God exists at all. The wall shakes us to the core. When you are at the wall, you will question everything you ever believed in. You’ll wonder if it’s a put-on, or perhaps wishful thinking. You may continue doing all the same things you did before. Praying, going to church, attending your small group – but something has changed. Instead of connecting you to God, these activities now seem to alienate you further. Everyone around you seems so sure, so confident. You feel like a heretic. You wonder if you even have faith at all anymore, and if there’s any reason to.
Some of you have been to the wall before, and you know that what I’m saying is true. Some of you have not been to the wall, and you’re probably busy right now trying to think of ways to avoid hitting the wall. Maybe if you learn a lot of Bible verses you can avoid it. Maybe if you get really close to God it won’t happen. Maybe if you go into counseling, or start meeting with a more mature believer, you can keep it from happening. But my friends, I assure you that there simply is no escaping the wall. Everyone will hit the wall, because the wall is a mathematical certainty. It is an equation born of one of your choices, combined with something you cannot choose. Here it is:
The Wall = Faith + Human Suffering
You cannot choose not to suffer in this life. That is not your choice and there is nothing you can do to avoid it. But you make the choice about whether or not to be a person of faith. And if you choose to be a person of faith, you have to place your faith in something. The wall is what results when the size of your suffering exceeds the size of your faith. This is part of the journey. I mean, the only thing you can place your faith in is what you are capable of grasping at any given moment. And before you have suffered deeply, you are simply not capable of grasping very much. Suffering expands our ability to comprehend life. Suffering rounds us out. Suffering tests us and deepens us. Suffering helps us see what matters and what doesn’t.
And it is not enough to merely know that suffering exists and that other people suffer. That will not deepen you sufficiently and the knowledge of the suffering of others will not bring you to the wall, unless another person you care about is suffering to such an extreme degree that their suffering creates deep suffering in you as well. The suffering that brings you to the wall is always personal suffering. Richard Rohr defines suffering as what happens when you cannot bring about the result that you want in your life. You cannot make someone love you. You cannot escape your newly diagnosed disease. You cannot make your child stop sleeping around or taking drugs. You cannot make your spouse treat you with respect. You cannot undo what happened in the car accident, or the fire, or the cuts at the company. You cannot bring back the loved one you have lost, or you cannot keep from losing him/her to this disease. You cannot find meaning in your job or your current life situation.
Somewhere along the road, you come to a loss so deep, so dramatic, and so forceful, that God starts seeming too small for it. Surely not even God can manage this. And if God can manage it, why didn’t God keep it from happening to begin with? Why did that person have to die? Why did you end up being the one to get cancer? Why won’t your children make better choices? What does this mean about you as a parent, or as a Christian, or as a husband or wife or employee or mother or father? What does it mean about God as a loving father, and a nurturing mother? The questions seem endless and they pound you relentlessly. Scripture no longer helps. Prayer seems weak and ineffective. The counsel of your friends seems shallow and worthless. No one understands, and you feel completely alone. That, my friends, is the wall. Everyone will suffer – that is not a choice that is left to us. But not all will choose to trust God. The wall is what happens when suffering comes that is so intense and so large that you can no longer see God, can no longer sense his presence, and where you eventually become unsure whether you even care.
If you have chosen to be a person of faith, then you can only respond to the wall in one of three ways. First is to abandon faith entirely. You can decide (and some do) that God was a figment of your imagination all along, and just give up on the whole God idea. Second is to regress. The wall is such a scary and exhausting place to be that when a person hits it, some people will choose to shrink back into the black and white platitudes they learned in Sunday school, or early in their faith journey. These people then can only become increasingly legalistic, judgmental, and harsh with themselves and others, since they have chosen not to integrate God into a view of life that openly acknowledges suffering and hardship, and any view of God that excludes suffering and hardship ultimately will be rigid and cruel. The third option when you hit the wall is to summon your courage, draw deeply on your faith (even when it means questioning or even rejecting it for a period of time), and journey forward, on through the wall. Give up, shrink back, or journey on.
Most of you know I grew up in the church. I learned Bible stories as a child and at a young age began reading the Bible regularly on my own, journaling about what I was learning. Of course I could never be as disciplined in this as I wanted to be, since a characteristic of immature faith is that it’s ultimately not about God but about ourselves and our own performance. In 1989 I decided I was sick of my weakness and inconsistency, and I committed to praying and reading the Bible and writing in my journal every day. And I did. I ended up doing this for well over 400 days IN A ROW. I read and read and prayed and prayed and wrote and wrote. I was so spiritual! In fact, if I could have picked any song that would have captured where my faith was (at least where I thought it was), it would have been this one:
After all, I didn’t know the future, but I knew who held my hand. After all, I might lose everything, but I couldn’t lose my God. After all, Jesus loved me, this I knew. After all, God was with Daniel in the lion’s den, and he would surely be with me always. After all – insert your own platitude/cliche.
Now you’d think at the end of this time I’d have been closer to God than ever . You’d think I’d have been so incredibly spiritual that God could have just taken me directly up into heaven. But do you know what brought that period of my life to a decisive end? The wall. Suffering that exceeded my faith – by a long shot.
See, around day 350 or so, a person I had been close to died in a car accident. She was 21, on her way to sing at a Christian music festival, when the van she was in rolled over, killing her and several other people in the vehicle. This was November 1, 1990.
A month later, on December 5, a neurologist told me I had multiple sclerosis. He said, “Dave, I’m not sure what to say now. There’s no treatment for MS, and there’s no cure, and there’s no way for me to predict how bad this will get, or how quickly it will progress, or whether it will progress at all, so my advice is to just try not to think too much about it.” Needless to say, that advice did not work.
Now I did not go home that day and say, “I’m done praying – there is no God.” In fact I didn’t even realize right away that my spiritual life had changed. I kept praying and reading and writing, as usual. I kept going to church. But everything I did I did with a newfound heaviness, a sense of impending doom, a deep sadness for my lost friend, her family, all of us who had cared about her, and of course most deeply for myself. And the fear. Fear like I had never experienced. Fear of dying, fear of living, fear of being in a wheelchair, not being able to talk, having to wear diapers, not being able to write or play guitar – fear of losing everything I stood to lose. Fear that at 22 years of age, Christy might soon find herself taking care of a cripple. And of course since my faith in God at that time was really about me and not so much about God (although I didn’t know it, and my intentions were good!), I was angry that God had not either prevented this stuff to begin with, or at least grown me enough so that I could deal with it (i.e, why didn’t God make this easier?). But day after day I did my studies and prayed to the walls and the ceiling.
Folks, don’t get the wrong idea. I had loved God to the best of my ability. I had desired with all my heart to know God and to be led by God and to serve God and to be a godly young man. But nothing in my life, nothing in my experience, nothing in my understanding had prepared me for this. Nothing COULD HAVE. I had hit the wall. My suffering had exceeded my faith, and it happened overnight.
For another few months I kept praying and reading the Bible and writing in my journal and going to church. But it just wasn’t “working.” I had so many questions, and the simple answer, “Have faith” wasn’t good enough. I felt like I didn’t have faith, and worst of all, like I couldn’t. In fact one morning around day 420 or so, I was sitting in church feeling totally empty and just lost in grief and confusion. Listening to sermons made me so angry. I got up and went downstairs to a room where there were no people. And I wrote the words to this song, which I recorded in my home studio a couple of months later.
Nothing serves better than these two songs we have played to explain to you what had happened to me – how far I had “fallen” – how different things had become, almost overnight. I had hit the wall, and there was no Bible verse, no sermon, no prayer, no essay, and certainly no theological argument, that was going to help me over that wall. I was in that place where I would have to either stop and move backwards, give up faith entirely, or move forward through the wall.
I chose to give up. Seriously. I decided (very painfully) that the whole God thing had been a mistake, but ironically I kept praying, “God, if I’m wrong about this, please don’t send me to hell.” There’s so much in that statement. There’s me disbelieving but still believing enough to pray, but there’s me still expressing that immature faith – that it wasn’t so much about knowing and finding God as it was about getting out of pain, or at least about not going to hell because of my unbelief. Immature faith is always concerned about itself. Immature faith is always in this for what I can get out of it. It can’t be any other way until something grows you beyond that point, and only the wall can do that.
Now I’m here today, so it’s obvious how this ultimately resolved for me. But it didn’t resolve quickly. I spent nearly three years out of the church, three years convinced that there is no God, three years disowning everything I had built my life on. And then, after three years, when I began to move back into faith, no one had taught me about the wall. No one had told me how to deal with the wall (because it’s not taught in our churches and no one knew!), so out of ignorance, I came out of my time in the desert, and simply went back to doing what I had done before. Praying, reading my Bible, going to church, and being a pastor! This was the only way I thought I could know God. So I went back to it. But those things didn’t work anymore. That open your Bible and read something and then write down your thoughts about it and then say a prayer to end your devotional time approach just didn’t work anymore. It didn’t work because I was no longer the same person. But it was all I knew, so I kept pressing on that lever. I did this for nearly 14 years – living in a spiritual wasteland, or desert, AFTER I had decided to return to faith and become a pastor. For 14 years my spiritual life was mostly flimsy and insufficient, because no one had taught me that the journey through the wall demands a new way of understanding God – a new way of meeting him and being with him and thinking about him and living with him. The journey through the wall can take us to the next level in our faith, but only if we don’t simply regress back into the simple faith of our childhood. For 14 years after I returned to faith, I again chided myself for being inconsistent, not faithful enough, not disciplined enough – more striving, more painful perfectionism, more guilt and self-loathing for not being as spiritual as I thought I should be. This garbage will never lead us to the deep places of real life in God – it will certainly never lead us beyond the false self – because it IS the false self! Now some of this stuff is an expression of a sincere desire for God so it’s good for what it is, but there’s so much more out there, and it’s in our journey through the wall that we find what that is. And as we continue to journey through life, we will continue to hit walls. We’ll continue to suffer from time to time in ways that stretch our faith. But after journeying through one wall, and finding God there, our faith will be a little deeper that God will meet us in the next one. And this, my friends, is precisely how faith grows. Without the wall and the suffering and the faith-stretching it produces, we will remain spiritual babies all of our lives.
And so again, I hope that teaching this stuff to you can help you. I don’t know what your wall will look like, or when your time will come, but I know it is waiting for you. My sincere hope is that by teaching you this, teaching you that it is normal, you will not make the mistake of thinking you had totally lost faith but will be able to see it for what it is – an essential part of the faith journey. I don’t think most people are going to be stuck at their wall for 14 years like I was! Like me, you will have to do whatever it takes to go through your wall, but unlike me, perhaps you will feel you have received permission to doubt, to question, to wrestle, to be depressed and angry and frustrated and discouraged. Perhaps, unlike me, you will know others have been there and have emerged with their faith not only intact, but deeper than ever.
I don’t want to do you the disservice of being anything less than completely honest about the wall. It is an agonizing place to be – but it gets you, perhaps for the first time – to a place where you are beyond yourself. You can’t put the pieces back together, and have nothing to rely on except the only one who knows what to do with all those pieces. The wall is a horrible experience, but waiting there for you is God, in deeper fullness, deeper reality, deeper richness, deeper love, deeper grace than you could ever have known previously. And the way through the wall? Truth. Honesty. Reality. To whatever extent we meet the wall with denial, with falsehood, with lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel “spiritual” in the old way that makes us comfortable, we will not find God but only more falsehood, creating even more layers to wrap around the false self. The wall can strip more layers of falsehood away from you than anything else – if you let it.
The wall is what frees you from what St. John of the Cross called the seven deadly spiritual imperfections of beginners:
1.Pride – The tendency to condemn others and be impatient with their faults. The idea that only certain people can teach me.
2.Avarice – Discontentment with the spirituality God has given them. Always striving to advance, rather than learning to rest in God.
3.Luxury – Taking more pleasure in the blessings of God than in God himself.
4.Wrath – Being easily irritated, lacking sweetness and patience
5.Spiritual gluttony – Resisting the cross and choosing spiritual pleasures like children do
6.Spiritual envy – Feeling unhappy when others do well spiritually. Always needing to compete
7.Sloth – Running from hard things. Their aim is spiritual sweetness and good feelings
God will use your wall to begin to free you from these things. What freedom this is! And remember:
John 8:36 (NKJV)
36 ... if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.
But freedom is found only through truth – through journeying through the wall, not ignoring it, denying it, or turning back. One of my favorite songwriters, Michael Roe, experienced a painful divorce about fifteen years ago. I want to end the message with a song he wrote at that time, giving his advice about what God might want us to do.
Looking up, crying out, raging, shouting, letting it all come out – that looks like heresy, like sacrilege, like compromise, to someone in the springtime of faith’s first encounter. But to someone spending winter at the wall, it is precisely where salvation lies.
