Thursday, February 09, 2006
(4:49 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Love of God
My experience of God is the experience of the absence of God. In the place where it was said to me that I would experienced God, I have each time experienced only a lack. We can go through the tedium of the "Holiness upbringing" -- the altar calls, the exhorbitant emotional demands. It is horrible. People continue to go through that every single day, and it is horrible -- but it is survivable. The price of that survival, however, has been a certain distrust of my own emotions -- never allowing myself to believe that what I was feeling was "it," was the tug of the Holy Spirit. I thought for sure that when it happened, I would be sure. I was never sure.I was never saved. There is no "date" that I write down -- no watershed date in my life, ever. I have always remained the same. It's not that I never tried, or never tried to try -- quite the opposite! I was a prolific repenter, always the one to round out the altar call. The time never seemed right. I was always terrified that if I went up quickly, I would become the focus of a huge prayer circle, with people touching me. For some, the hand of a near stranger on one's shoulder may be reassuring, but for me, I knew it would make concentration impossible. The purity of emotion -- a plenitude of emotion, the focus of one's whole being, which becomes the equivalent of a complete evacuation of emotion and of self -- required concentration, I was sure. And so I waited, until it became too late, until I was sure that I was perceived as making the attempt only out of peer pressure -- the poor, pathetic kid. Better to stand resolute, arms crossed.
My conversion to Catholicism was an attempt to capture God, by holding him to his promises in the sacraments. The night of my conversion was a night of self-emptying -- on being confirmed, my entire body relaxed, so that my sponsor had to hold me up. It was as though I was playing the "trust" game where you fall backwards into your partner's arms. It was to be short-lived. My years at college were years of intense loneliness, and that loneliness, that absence, became focussed in the experience of church. The question inevitably arose: priesthood? I couldn't do it. All other issues aside, I couldn't imagine being so overworked and simultaneously so lonely -- I was used to people finding me intimidating or to feeling out of place, but the ontological marking of ordination seemed like a weight too heavy to bear.
Years of stand-sit-kneel, waiting impatiently through the mediocre homilies, disciplining myself not to be one of those who walk out right after communion -- it was a necessary practice. I had to come to understand something through those years, through the hot summer sun bearing down on me as I walked from the parking lot to the weekday noon mass at St. Rose. I had to bury my hopes through the exhaustion of the only practice that had ever come close to giving me what I had hoped for.
Perhaps I still have not succeeded entirely -- perhaps this will be my burden to carry for the rest of my life, the burden of the love of God. God has always been my greatest temptation -- piety and mysticism, the pleasures I have had to learn to deny myself. For me, the religion of the soul and its God has become the religion without soul, without God -- the piety of study, the mysticism of the letter. I am alone in a world without God: that is a place to begin, at least.
