The Modern Relevance of God
Finding Meaning in an Inverted World
The Dark Night of the Soul. In the theological canon, this signifies a spiritual crisis in a journey towards union with God. In more secular language, that would be the transformational journey that takes place when you’re suffering.
A journey of transformation. A conversion, even. A deep repentance for a path ill chosen. And at the end, “the sudden reception of grace,” as Aquinas called it. Surely that’s what slave trader John Newton must have gone through on that wild stormy night as he stood on the wind-swept deck and surprisingly found himself muttering, “May God have mercy on our souls.” Apparently that caused some reflection when he retreated to his captain’s chambers below. An atheist, and self-avowed scoundrel appealing to divine salvation in a time of need. And a questioning that led him to repent his misspent ways in the slave trade. eventually becoming an Anglican minister and penning the unforgettable words, “I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.” Amazing grace, indeed.
Victor Frankl talked about man’s search for meaning, and he declared that this was to be found in overcoming oneself, giving oneself to a cause, or even to another to love. He speculated that being truly human meant being directed to something or someone other than ourselves. He called this “the self-transcendence of human existence” and witnessed it frequently, even in the depths of despair that was Auschwitz.
But I’m wondering now, if the transcendence we’re seeking isn’t something more than just moving beyond ourselves, but is in fact a search for something, not other than ourselves, but greater than ourselves. Something to believe in certainly, but also something to explain our existence and all of this magnitude we live inside. And for this, we need theology. We can’t get there through apps or economics. We need that wisdom that plums the depths of human experience to find the answers to the questions, not just more questions.
The country of Portugal was established based on this dream of a new world, a Fifth Empire that would initiate a period of 1000 years of justice and peace and spirituality on Earth. “The Kingdom of God,” they called it. It’s a dream that resides like a memory inside the human breast and the desire for this signifies that we recognize the loss of it. We’ve become separated from it, and even from the consideration of it, and this has had enormous ramifications for our daily lives.
The Psychotic Separation from God, in this episode with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.