I have been absent from the Orthodox Church for most of 4 years, which means that I have been absent from her for longer than I was present. And yet Orthodoxy has an undeniable claim on me. After four years of avoiding the Church, of wrestling with complex waves of longing, despair, and mistrust of Orthodoxy in America I have arranged a meeting with my old priest, now retired, to see how I can set my relationship with the church to rights. From this step alone I have experienced an amount of peace.

In coming to Orthodoxy, I was responding to an entirely new landscape, a new view of heaven and of the Kingdom of God which completely transcended any experience I had known prior to this. And yet, as I became Orthodox, as I joined myself with Orthodoxy I failed. For a long time I battered myself against an impassable obstacle -- I tried to be Orthodox through thinking and to some extent through doing. It became a framework upon which to hang my life, with which to identify myself, all the while I was growing increasingly despondent as I experienced one devastating disillusionment after another.

In my recently renewed zeal for the Church, for God as made present within the Church, it suddenly dawned on me -- I habitually "nest"; I almost obsessively surround myself with Orthodox "things" books, music, icons, prayers. It is as if I am trying to find God through the addition of things, a sort of spiritualization by acquisition and accumulation. And yet, all these things, however good they may be, do not make God more present to me. It is as if I am blindly groping and grasping at straws, trying to force God to be present to me, or to force myself to be present to Him. And in realizing this, I realize that at the core of all this is a deep and insatiable longing to be aware of God, to be assured of His love for me, to be assured of His goodness and his involvement with the world, to find myself not an alien to Him, not at odds with Him. I long for peace, for a sense of His love. I long for His presence.

There are moments when I feel blessed, when I feel the immediacy of God, his immanence. And yet, most often, he seems to me to be a concept, an abstraction, a possibility, an idea to be considered. Those moments when God "appears" seem to be at odd moments, completely beyond my grasp, completely beyond my ability to control. The rest of the time it is as if I was groping aimlessly, looking for something lost, misplaced. It is as if, on my own, my faith is still intellectual and emotional, psychological, but at moments the reality of God exhibits itself. How can I have more of God without self delusion? How does one go beyond psychology and moral, pious actions? How does one become truly a child of God?

I read a great deal of Mother Theresa's letters in Come Be My Light and have to admit that after a while I grew sick of it, despondent with her darkness, self-accusation, self-hatred. She was convinced of God almost, as it were, through her own doubt and darkness. I put it away. Her darkness and conviction spurred her on to great works of love and charity. But I can only think that it's all rather beside the point when God seems so far off, so distant and vague. So dark.

By night on my bed,
I sought him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn't find him.
I will get up now, and go about the city;
In the streets and in the squares I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn't find him.
The watchmen who go about the city found me;
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"
I had scarcely passed from them,
When I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him into my mother's house,
Into the chamber of her who conceived me.
I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes, or by the hinds of the field,
That you not stir up, nor awaken love,
Until it so desires.

When he is found -- how do we not let him go? When he makes himself present in our lives, how do we hold on to that closeness? How does one grasp at light so that darkness remains at a distance? How do we keep our souls from retreating back into the abyss?

Update: For those of you who care, I've been back in church for a while now (today is September 19, 2008). I've found a parish I'm can live in. A place to put some roots. I'm glad to be back. I'm glad that being back, I am not what I was before I left.

Faith. From my current perspective it looks as if it is this which lies at the heart of my spiritual crises. And my approach to the problem has been rather analytical, a matter of sorting through mental and emotional associations to isolate the key issues -- if only I can find a definitive answer on "this" then I can walk forward, establishing myself in a framework of faith, and "life will then be good". Of course, I rarely admit to myself that I am quite so naïve, but at some level there is this child-like hope that if I can only have this one thing -- the answer to my question -- then all will be well. Call it "mental acquisitiveness".

Let's take a look at Abraham -- this time straight from Genesis 22:

Continuing on with the theme of Abraham and faith, here are two patristic quotes:

And who does not see whose figure Abraham's only son was, he who bore the wood for the sacrifice of himself to that place whither he was being led to be offered up? For the Lord bore His own cross, as the Gospel tells us.

St. Augustine of Hippo. Homily IX on John II, 12.

Great indeed was the faith of Abraham. For while in the case of Abel, and of Noah, and of Enoch, there was an opposition of reasonings, and it was necessary to go beyond human reasonings; in this case it was necessary not only to go beyond human reasonings, but to manifest something more. For what was of God seemed to be opposed to what was of God; and faith opposed faith, and command promise. I mean this: He had said, 'Get out of your country, and from your kindred, and I will give you this land' (Gen. 12:1,7). 'He gave him no inheritance in it, no not so much as to set his foot on' (Acts 7:5). Do you see how what was done was opposed to the promise? Again He said, 'In Isaac your seed shall be called' (Gen. 21:12), and he believed: and again He says, Sacrifice to Me this one, who was to fill all the world from his seed. You see the opposition between the commands and the promise? He enjoined things that were in contradiction to the promises, and yet not even so did the righteous man stagger, nor say he had been deceived.

St. John Chrysostom. Homily XXV on Hebrews XI, 1., http://ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF1-14/npnf1-14-118.htm

It is no secret to those who are close to me that I have been suffering through a crisis of faith for the last several months. And to be completely honest, it seems to be a pattern with me. There are at least two ways of looking at this: the first way, my natural inclination, is to look at myself in something of despondency and think of St. James, the Brother of Christ, when he writes:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

James 1:5-8

But a friend of mine recently pointed out to me that there is another way of understanding this--that of healthy skepticism. Unlike cynicism, a healthy questioning has it's proper place within cycles of growth--it serves as a pruning of our spiritual life, an opportunity to remove dead-growth so that new-growth may take its place.

I have been seeking for some little project, and in the process I have landed upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In this book, Johannes de Silentio[1] is considering the Biblical story of the testing of Abraham.

I would like to quote two sections: the first is from the Preface, and has to do with the nature of faith, that it is a lifetime's work and not some small act like passing through a gate; the second is from the Preliminary Expectoration, and has to do with the real anxiety (or "dread") of the story.