Our faith in God can be attached, bound up, with certain people and/or things. At one point in history, the Jews reached the heights of a glorious and solid faith because God had granted them their deepest desires. They had had the great Kings they requested: David and his son Solomon. Especially through the battle genius of David, tribes and land were united. They had a beautiful new Temple in Jerusalem, built under the orders of Solomon. Because of these tangible people and possessions, the Jewish people believed in a good God.
But then their enemies got rid of their latest King, herded the majority of the people out of their land into exile, and destroyed their precious Temple. The people's faith was shattered! They'd lost what mattered most: land, king, and temple. How could God do this to them! Had God stopped loving them? Did God even exist?
When we lose what matters most to us, we feel and believe as if we've lost possession of God. But the God we lose possession of is a God Whom we'd created ourselves, in certain ways in our own image. We all "create" a God for ourselves Who thinks and feels and believes as we do about our lives and what's important or necessary. When this "God as we know Him" disappears, we become adrift from faith as we know it. We have entered a dark night of the soul. We no longer know Who God is and Who God is for us.
Parents, for example, whose children are their most precious possessions, enter a dark night when those children grow up and stop going to Church. Why, they ask, has God forsaken our family? Have we done something wrong?
Religious women, whose Orders are slowly dying because there are so few postulants and novices, enter dark nights of the soul at the slow deaths of their religious families. Why has this happened, God? they ask. Have we done something wrong?
Priests, who see fewer and fewer younger priests entering their ranks, and grow old and exhausted from more and more pastoral responsibilities, enter dark nights. Where are the men to replace us, God? they ask. What have we done wrong?
Parishioners, who watch the doors of their favorite churches shut for the last time, lament this loss of another dear home. Why have you forsaken us, God? they cry. What have we done wrong?
In all these cases, individuals have done nothing wrong. Somehow this God Who is completely Other, Who is ineffable, beyond our language, thoughts, concepts, imaginations, and grasp, - allows certain things to happen in the lives of individuals and communities for an ultimate reason: to wean us away from our false images of God. By separating us from whatever we think is permanent and absolutely necessary for us to have in order to have faith, God reveals to us that faith and God are much greater than our narrow desires and ideas. It's the plans of GOD'S own Heart that will last from age to age.
Think of your faith as being like a caterpillar. Our faith, like a caterpillar, is small at first, but as we feed it, our faith grows and grows until finally its "skin" - its understanding of God - is too tight and has to be shed. Then a new skin is built until the skin is too tight and the caterpillar molts again, sheds its skin and forms new skin. This happens over and over again until the caterpillar enters a chrysalis for its final growth into a butterfly. Through all this growth and change of our faith we eventually are transformed into butterflies, ready for Heaven.
Fr. Ronald Rolheiser has gentle answers for people undergoing the above faith crises, dark nights.
Even if your children have stopped going to Church, he says, they're still good kids. They haven't left the Church, they've stopped going to Church. And as long as you parents hold tight to them with love and prayers, they still belong to the Body of Christ - through you. They still belong to the Church as long as they lovingly belong to their families because their families are the Domestic Church. Don't blame yourselves, he says. This happens because of our hyper-individualistic, over-busy culture.
All you loving Sisters, he says, perhaps your Orders are dying out, but who you are and all you taught will not die. You live on within the multitude of individuals whose lives you impacted with your generous lives and your glowing faith.
The same could be said of all the good priests we know: they will live on in the lives of all the people whom they have changed for the better through their selfless service and sacramental presence.
For all those who have lost their Churches, it's good to remember that God has many Church buildings. But as Jesus and the apostles taught us, we ourselves are living Churches, living Temples of the Holy Spirit. God is with us wherever we travel. God lives more intimately within each of our souls which He has constructed than God lives in any building constructed by human beings.
When we shed the constricting "skin" of an undeveloped and immature faith, God is growing us into wider, deeper, more elastic appreciations of Who He is and what He wants to accomplish in our lives and in our communities' lives and even in our world's and our universe's lives. Even if we temporarily lose a felt presence of God in our lives, sometimes it's because we're looking for God in all the wrong places. God is hidden in plain sight, says Fr. Rolheiser.
A child living and growing in its mother's womb has no concept of its mother, even though its mother's body surrounds him. A fish swimming in the depths of the ocean has no concept of the ocean because it surrounds him, and because he is so tiny, no concept of the ocean's size. A person who looks directly at sunlight feels her vision grow dark from too much light. God is too close to us for us to sense God. In God, we live and move and breathe and have our being. God cannot be possessed, but only be participated in, like breathing air. The movements of God's active and loving life pervade our lives, if only we can become aware.
God doesn't disappear when we can no longer sense, feel, or imagine God as we once did. God, as we know him with our immature faith, has disappeared. A newer, greater, deeper, more "real" God is waiting in the wings. A God Whom we allow to be God when we say "My God I trust in You." A God Who purifies us by pushing us to shed the tight skin of immature faith which constricts our deepening knowledge of Him. A God Who holds all we love and possess safely in His Hands to do with as He wills because He knows what everyone and everything needs far more than we do.
The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is anxiety. Don't be anxious as you seem to leave God's Light and enter the dark night. Keep your eyes on the Son of God Who is the Sun of your life. Your sight only appears dark because His Light will always be too bright for our limited senses to understand.