When life is hard to understand, God is hard to understand. And I'm also hard for myself to understand. It's as if both God and I are undergoing changes. But God isn't changing. My understanding of Who God is is changing. I'm changing, and my understanding of who I am is changing.
When my mother died in April, I suddenly thought "I'm an orphan now." My Dad had died over forty years ago, but as long as I had one parent, I wasn't alone. Now I am parent-less. I've changed. I'm an adult, but I still feel off-center, adrift. I mourn: for the mother I had as well as the mother I never knew, the one who existed before I was born, the introvert who kept much of her thoughts and feelings hidden. Who will I be now, as an orphan?
I and friends I know who have lost a child, as well as friends who've lost their spouses, talk about that same sense of disorientation and drifting. In losing someone so much a part of us, we feel as if we've lost half of who we are. How do we put our lives back together into a healed whole? And when there is sudden illness, ours or afflicting someone we love, we're no longer whole; we feel irretrievably broken.
Whenever there's an abrupt shift in our lives, we lose a sense of who we are because we're scrambling to make sense of a new reality (which often seems a nightmare.) Our current self doesn't seem adequate to deal with all this newness. How can I cope with this? Do I have the skills to cope? When will I stop feeling paralyzed? Can I stop crying long enough to put together an action plan? We've suddenly, terrifyingly, lost faith in ourselves.
Who and where is God? I remember that God especially cares for the poor, the widows, the orphans. God knows that we feel emotionally impoverished during a crisis or stressful time. When we've lost a loved one, or anything precious, even when we've lost a dream, we feel poor because we've lost a sense of who we are, we've lost a sense of safety. We suddenly discover: If this has happened, anything can happen! But - how does God take care of us at a time like this? We lose faith in God's ability to help us: CAN God help us through this? We no longer know who God is.
Scripture images of God can help us here. My favorite one is God working on a potter's wheel.
God says: "Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand." (Jeremiah 18: 1- 6.)
God, our Father, is the Potter; we are the clay. For God didn't just create us once. God is constantly re-creating us - and we're clay, we're malleable. God is constantly re-creating us to make us more closely resemble Him. But each of us resembles Him as a totally unique work of art.
A potter begins with a vision of what he wants to create. She chooses the right clay for the vase, for example, that she wishes to make. He kneads it, adds water, kneads some more. Imagine all that kneading, all the different degrees of hardness and softness the clay experiences, going from one form to another. Think of all the various experiences in our lives that variously harden and soften our hearts, turn and twist and untwist our thoughts and perceptions. The potter is kneading out all the imperfections, as our lives "knead out" our selfishness, our narrow understandings. Maybe we don't see or feel or experience all the changes within ourselves, but God our Potter knows them. God expects them. God wants them!
Then the potter throws the clay into the middle of his wheel. Throws!! How many times have you ever felt thrown - thrown for a loss! Hurtled into a new reality you never wanted or expected? Then the potter turns the wheel, using the pressure of her hands to shape and keep the clay in the middle. Do you ever picture God's steadying hands holding you firm when you feel as if you could fall apart?
If the potter discovers a lump in the pot, he crushes that pot, puts the clay on his board, adds water, begins to knead all over again. How often has life crushed you? How often have you felt so destroyed that you were having to begin to live all over again? You are not having to re-form yourself on your own. God our Potter is once again molding you, readying you for the final furnace, the final glazing. Death, the final furnace. Eternity, the exquisite glazing.
Beginning to have faith again in ourselves and beginning to have faith again in God go hand in hand. Once we have faith in ourselves that we can get through this, that we'll come out of it on the other side a changed, new person, then suddenly we can see that God is taking a hand in strengthening us, molding us, changing us. Once we believe that God is the One Who will carry us through it all with a steadying hand, we begin to get a vision of the person we can become with God's help.
God gives each of our lives His personal artist's touch. God uses everything that happens to us to create a more and more glorious "us." God begins with a vision of how He can form us, who we can become, and how He can and will use us as a special and unique sacred vessel containing His Love.
But there's still another aspect of all this. When the clay is on the potter's wheel, if it doesn't stick on, it falls off. Similarly, those who don't hold on to God or "stay with the process" of the revolving wheel of life, get thrown off and become bitter, rigid, unable to be molded, to grow. This is what losing faith really means: refusing to be "moldable," losing the capacity to grow, and losing the capacity for your image and understanding of God to grow.
If you stay steady in God's hands, stick to that revolving wheel, remain malleable clay, you WILL grow. So you don't have to worry about feeling as if you've temporarily lost faith in yourself or God. You haven't. You're experiencing faith in transition. You're in the process of discovering a new you and a God Who is probably much bigger and more mysterious than you realized. A God Who is NOT you. Who is so Other than us that His Will is mostly incomprehensible to us. Yet Who is, as Jesus tells us, a loving Father to us, a Father Who has His plans and dreams for our lives. Plans and dreams for for you that are more wonderful and awe-inspiring than you can imagine.
When we know that God is so much bigger than we are, we can relax about it all, be at peace in our soul's depths even when storms rage on the surface of our lives. Theologian James Alison says
"Crises of faith are normal, and not at all the end of the world. They are exactly what you would expect! It's precisely because you are relaxed about someone (God) who is bigger than you holding you that you are relaxed enough to undergo crises of self. " (from Jesus: the Forgiving Victim)
So, when our faith is about the size of one tiny star, valiantly trying to hold off the darkness, it's priceless to remember in our hearts the One far bigger than we are Who goes on steadily holding us in the dark.