A Crisis of Faith

The Reverend Christopher Hogin

A Crisis of Faith: Genesis 28:10-19; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23

The Episcopal Church of the Ascension

July 23, 2017

What happens when our beliefs get rocked to the core? What happens when everything we are certain of gets turns upside down? How do we cope?

            Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist, political activist, and staunch atheist. Some of you may have read her bestseller, Nickle and Dimed. She wrote a memoir a few years, but not one you’d expect. The memoir is not a diatribe on the economic or political system of our country. Instead, she reflects on two events during her younger years that shook her deeply.

            The first incident happened when she and her family visited a horse show. Bored, she wandered into a nearby forest. Everything appeared normal. Then it all changed. Something happened. For a brief moment a layer of reality peeled away. The forest was no longer a forest. It was a living pulsating entity. The tree was no longer just a tree, but fully alive. She saw vivid details, as though staring into an ultra-super-sonic high definition television: it was a world beneath a world where language and words no longer held meaning, but existed on an alternate plane. Then everything snapped back to normal. The forest was just a forest. The tree just a tree.

            Ehrenreich never told anyone what happened. She tried forgetting about it, until it happened again. This time she was seventeen years old. She, her brother, and friend spent the night camping in Lone Pine, California. The next morning, she awoke and wandered out into the desert. There, she once again experienced a peeling away of reality, only this time she saw the world flaming into life. Fires raged everywhere, not in a good or bad way, but in an alive sort of way. In the midst of it all she had an encounter with what she describes as, “an encounter with something living” that transcended beyond all human categories. Like the first time, the vision soon ended.   

            Ehrenreich never spoke of either of these events. She’s a staunch atheist, and such encounters, or “mystical experiences” went against her deeply held beliefs as an atheist. For the longest time she dismissed these encounters as a form of delusion or mental illness. It wasn’t until she was in her late sixties, and a breast cancer survivor, that she confronted her past. Although she never releases her atheism, she finds herself wanting to know scientifically what happened. As she exclaims, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.” (As a side note, I find it odd she entitles her book, Living With A Wild God).

            Let me tell you about a second woman, a woman on the very opposite end of the theological spectrum from Barbara Eherenreich. This woman came from Albania, but she changed the world. She opened up a home for the death and dying, first in India, and then in impoverished places all over the world. She won the Nobel Peace Prize, and is a model of faith and piety for so many people. She died in 1997, but was proclaimed a Saint by Pope Francis in September of last year.

            Yet Mother Teresa had her own secret that she kept hidden. This staunch pillar of faith endured a crisis of faith herself for almost forty years. She wrote the following to a friend:    

“Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness—My

God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart -- & make me suffer untold agony.”

Both women had their world rocked, and their fundamental beliefs challenged: one questioned her atheism, the other questioned her faith. Both were changed in some way with an encounter: one by encountering an unexplainable entity, the other enduring emptiness, or more accurately, a dark night of the soul.

            Although we may never experience the same level of intensity as Mother Teresa and Barbara Ehrenreich, their story is our story. We too will have encounters with the unexpected, maybe not mystic visions, but certainly encounters with God. We also will have those dark nights of the soul. When our faith appears hollow and empty. Where even sitting here in church does nothing. Both instances reveal a bit of the human condition, which is our world often becomes disoriented.

            This is why I find comfort our reading: in Genesis with Jacob’s Ladder, and the Psalm 139. In both readings there’s intimacy. God is always ever-present. With Jacob, who has mystical vision embedded in his dream, God is literally standing beside him, much in the same why I believe God was in the presence of Barbara Ehrenreich during her mystical experiences (something I know she’d vehemently disagree with). At the same time, the writer of Psalm 139 [see below] appears to come from a place of great pain. The writer realizes that no matter what happens to us, or where we are in life we cannot hide from God, even when we don’t feel God’s presence, God is always there. Carl Jung had a plaque above his door which read, “bidden or unbidden, God is always there.” The fact that Mother Teresa named her pain, named her struggle, and wrestled with her darkness and doubt show a tremendous amount of strength, courage, and faith.

            We are not alone. I promise you we are not. No matter the dark nights of the soul that awaken us at 3 am in the midst of fear, or in moments of extreme doubt. God is with us, no matter who we are, what we’ve done, or what we are going through. We are not alone

                                                                                                            Amen

Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

Domine, probasti

1 Lord, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

2 You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.

3 Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O Lord, know it altogether.

4 You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.

5 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

6 Where can I go then from your Spirit? *
where can I flee from your presence?

7 If I climb up to heaven, you are there; *
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

8 If I take the wings of the morning *
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

9 Even there your hand will lead me *
and your right hand hold me fast.

10 If I say, "Surely the darkness will cover me, *
and the light around me turn to night,"

11 Darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day; *
darkness and light to you are both alike.

22 Search me out, O God, and know my heart; *
try me and know my restless thoughts.

23 Look well whether there be any wickedness in me *
and lead me in the way that is everlasting.

“Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness—My

God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart -- & make me suffer untold agony.”

I was just staring at the woods ... [when] something happened. It's like a layer peeled off the world, the layer that contains all the meanings, the words, the language, the associations we have. Yeah, I was looking at trees, but I no longer could say I knew exactly what a tree was, with all the knowledge and experience that goes into our notion of a tree.

I didn't find it scary ... I guess it is for some people, because I have since, many years since, read about people who suffer from something called dissociation disorder and have this happen to them occasionally, and they seem to hate it. I just thought, well, this is pretty interesting. ...

What if there is a world underneath what we perceive? We're usually in a world of shared "reality." You and I agree on what we see if we're together, we have similar explanations for it, and so on. To leave that behind and just see things without any of those human attributions, well, that's very, very strange, but I wanted to know more. ... I couldn't tell anybody. I had enough sense to think that this would be seen as crazy.