Trust in God's Leadings
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by Liz Parish
This article concerns fear of and yearning for God, as felt by a directee I saw for about a year. I was glad when this woman approached me, wanting to talk about some spiritual issues that were troubling her. I had always considered her a peer, because we are close in age and we both have backgrounds in psychology.Once I began meeting with her, it seemed to me that psychology was the largest stumbling block in her own spiritual development and that it also had the potential of being a stumbling block in our work together, because of the temptation to lapse into psychological language familiar to both of us. Fortunately we were aware of this temptation and were attentive to avoiding it.
Though this woman had a great desire for God, she also had a strong resistance to God and an overwhelming fear of death that pervaded every day of her life, entered every direction session. Her resistance to God was evident in two primary ways. One was in anger at God for certain adversities and for not giving her, she felt, the spiritual resources she needed to deal with them and with death. Second was that in her family she had been taught that a belief in God was for the intellectually and emotionally weak. This attitude was reinforced by her psychological training: any feeling of union with God, she believed, was regressive and pathological. The same was true of any feeling of love for and union with another.
She desperately wanted union with God and connection with others but was terrified of it. When she would have experiences in which she felt God's presence--experiences of comfort and connection to something "out there"--she would immediately remind herself that this was regressive and pathological. She called her doing this "rattling her cage" and noted the image of imprisonment.
In talking with her, I repeatedly sensed that God was actively working in her, calling her to greater life. She spoke of being more aware of events outside her in the world, more actively concerned for the world, and not wanting to be. She felt a greater connection to the world around her in nature, but at the same time, more aware of its beauty and its pain. She found herself unable to anesthetize herself with television when she wanted to avoid something. Her fear of union with God and with others seemed to be not only a fear of death but also a fear of truly living and of losing control.
My experience with this directee led me to see the tremendous disadvantage to spiritual development that psychological knowledge can be, and how splitting head from heart (as she complained of doing and as we do in our culture and in our educational system) can keep one from knowing God. In her I saw a more accentuated version of some of my own tendencies: the comfort and familiarity of psychological language, the avoidance of life. My "one sermon" (because I need to hear it myself) is to face life head-on and live it with passion. God is found in life and also in death--but perhaps not in deadness.
Even writing about this, it is tempting to lapse into a mindset common to psychological thought and to speak in terms of stage theories, analysis and diagnoses. But these are not what heal the spirit and save the soul. I moved from psychology to religion because I felt that psychology, at least as commonly practiced today, doesn't go deep enough and touch what truly matters to people. Yet perhaps for this very reason, psychology is much more comfortable, so we use its terms and avoid the language and motions of the Spirit.
In our last meeting, this woman had a kind of "ah-hah!" experience. The meeting followed a sermon I gave, in which I spoke about increasingly finding power, truth and meaning in the Gospels and in the Christian path. She said she could barely sit still from the energy and excitement she felt inside her and that afterwards something changed for her. My speaking what I truly believed, and her seeing my own belief in God, gave her permission to believe and to be different from what she had been. As we talked, she could feel something coming together inside her and finally was able to express it: that "faith is not the easy way out," as she had thought it was. She then felt so affected by this (as did I) that she just had to sit with it, unable to say much else. Even though the following summer showed her that growth in the spirit is not a once-for-all and immediate event, she continued to feel stronger and to have less resistance to the presence of God.
My experience with this directee made me profoundly grateful for the action of the Holy Spirit in us and through us and aware of and grateful for the transformative power of God's Word, even across lines of faith traditions. These can heal the spirit and save the soul, but we cannot control this action or even know when it will happen. What seems called for is continued trust in God's leadings, following the yearning through the fear, perhaps with a gentle persistence (plus humor and humility when we slip). I know I need this myself, trusting in God's grace, not fearing where God might lead me, even if I don't understand it completely.
Liz was a participant in the Winter 1994 Spiritual Guidance Program. She currently is living in Hawaii, where she is taking an interim year from parish ministry and learning the spiritual discipline of surfing.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.