Journal of the Plague Year: The Slow Work of God

COVID, and COVID-tide, has been very kind to me as an objective matter.  No one close to me has died of the Coronavirus, only two people I am close to contracted the virus, and both appear to have recovered completely.  I still have my job, and my employer is doing quite well.  COVID, ultimately, has been mostly an inconvenience, at least in terms of the direct impact it has had on me.  

And, yet, COVID-tide has coincided with a crisis of faith for me.  Like many things, this has become only apparent to me as I have started to climb out of it in the last few weeks, with the help of a couple of old friends, and one new one.  If I have to describe it, I would call it a spiritual depression, in the sense that I had all of the now-familiar to me symptoms of depression, but only as it related to matters relating to faith.  That strange combination of lassitude and anxiety greeted me every time I tried to watch a service via streaming, or engage with others about religious topics.

The lassitude piece is easy to understand--I just didn't want to do any of it.  But the anxiety piece was a little different, and definitely more specific.  The anxiety that I was feeling orbited around the notion of certainty, the idea that anyone, including "religious" people, had all the answers.  It was almost like I was allergic to assertions of correctness, or knowledge, or wisdom.  It felt false, foolish, misguided no matter the contents of the assertion.

In March, I wrote a piece on this blog about COVID, and how only a firm clinging to an orthodox understanding of the Resurrection can provide guidance and comfort in times of crisis.  You won't find that piece on the blog anymore, because I deleted it a couple of months ago.  Upon reading it again, I was disgusted by it, and in a fit of pique I wiped it out.  It seemed so arrogant, so falsely self-confident, so condescending.  Not only was I disgusted with it, I was disgusted with myself for writing it.  I staked out the position that only one narrow sort of faith can be sustaining in crisis, and now I found myself feeling unsustained by that One True Faith.

In hindsight, I wish I hadn't deleted it, because I feel like this blog is in a real way a chronicle of my change and growth (at least, hopefully) over these years.  I have never previously deleted anything I had published on this blog before, and I feel like I am not being honest in deleting it.  But, it's gone now, and in any event I still don't particularly care for the person who wrote that piece.

I don't like that fact that in that piece I come across as just like the narrow, exclusionist, arrogant traditionalist Roman Catholics that I fled from a couple of years ago.  I worry that a fundamentalist who is in favor of women's ordination and gay marriage is still a fundamentalist, and that I had fallen into that trap.  I worry that I had fallen into the same trap of seeking the politics of certainty, just with a different arrangement of chairs.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, I feel like I am coming out of my funk.  And what helped me most was a poem, from a spiritual director who I recently have been working with.  The poem is by the brilliant, controversial Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, called "The Slow Work of God":

Above all, trust in the slow work of God

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you.

your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances

acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

This was a lifeline for me, and she brought it up without having any way of knowing that it would be so perfect.  I feel like I had been trying to skip ahead, past the slow process of moving out of one thing into another,in favor of latching on to false and forced certainties.  I do feel in suspense and incomplete, and rather than being a problem to solve, perhaps it is a reality to be embraced.      

So, what I think I would like to do over the next weeks or months is to write a few explorations.  There are things that I have been thinking, things that I am not sure make any sense, or even that I agree with them.  I would like to write them out, without worrying about deciding later that it was silly.  

I think it will help.  Consider it a Slow Work.

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