God of the darkness

Faith felt quite simple until I went through some suffering that I couldn’t explain. I don’t mean the kind of suffering that feels character forming or noble somehow, like you always know that you’ll get through a bit stronger and a bit braver. I mean the kind that grates against our sense of freedom and who we’re meant to be. In these times, we can feel overwhelmed by the pointlessness and frustration. Maybe things were going well and we’ve had a sudden tragedy pull the rug from under our feet. Maybe we just feel worn down by the daily knocks that come with life. Or maybe we’re in a season where things feel heavy with meaninglessness. Darkness has come and God has gone quiet. What comfort is an invisible God in this place? What can prayers do when we see the worst happen to people around us?

All of us in life will hit some sort of struggle that we can’t easily explain or pack away in a neat Christian box. For me, it was less about one big thing happening, and more about many battles inside my own brain. And I’ll be honest, when this happened to me, I didn’t feel like the church was a place where I could bring this sense of mystery or confusion. The classic answers didn’t help when everything had gone dark. And it can become awkward when our pain sticks around for a while, and isn’t solved by healing prayer or support from friends. We can struggle for a while, but there comes a point where we inevitably feel like it has gone on too long and we should be feeling better by now.

I don’t think we should try and explain suffering or demystify it. There is no explaining it away or words that can help someone in real darkness. But what I do think is that Christianity offers one of the only frameworks that confronts the reality of life. My experience has been that despite being a Christian all of my thirty-seven years, it has only been recently that I have begun to hear a quiet invitation towards the darkness and mystery of life.

A lot of our culture is about disguising the bad in order to emphasise the good. Social media highlights a sickness that has been there a long time; we like to push forwards the shiny parts of our life. So often we hide less palatable parts of ourselves, piecing together an identity from the bits that we have learned are acceptable, and burying the rest somewhere within. More than this, though, we even hide from ourselves. It’s understandable and we all do it. Life has stung us at certain points, and so we learn to hide from our negative emotions and the parts of ourselves we deem unworthy. We find solace in denial. If we start to feel something we don’t understand or that hurts us, we can often distract or numb ourselves from our real self or true feelings.

Whilst I’m talking generally about culture here, I am also talking about me. It is my natural instinct to want to avoid anything dark, ugly or that I don’t understand. There are days when everything falls apart in our household - we are all past our limits, and it results in arguing, shouting and tension. And my instinct is to bury my head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. But more and more I am realising that Christianity is a faith that doesn’t shy away from the reality of darkness. It doesn’t explain, minimise or gloss over suffering. But the God who came into our mess shows us that we can look darkness in the eye and make space for the reality of it in the present moment. We can learn to sit with it in compassionate curiosity. To look at it and say, I struggle with you, I don’t find you easy, but I acknowledge that you are here and you are part of my existence. Because ultimately, God dwells in what is real. When we give up the battle of denial or toxic positivity (different to healthy positivity), we will find that we have far more energy to deal with what is real - to grieve, to rage and to cry out in raw honesty. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, acknowledging our struggle is now also recognised by psychologists as one of the keys to healthy living. The more we allow all of our emotions to exist, the more that we are also able to be surprised by emotions like joy, contentment and love.

I’ll be clear - this is different to saying our suffering is OK and that it is ‘for our good’ and so we should grin and bear it. I don’t believe it is OK or God-willed. Darkness is not how things should be. And all over the Bible we are given examples of genuine wrestling with deep pain and injustice. Making space to acknowledge and confront how things really are doesn’t mean watering down our feelings until we feel a false sense of peace. It's the opposite - it means being real with whatever comes up in response to darkness - however ugly or raw. And there are times in our life where the suffering will be so expansive and painful that our bodies and minds might enter a season of 'survival mode', although the responses and grief will look different for everyone. During these times we can become numb to what is real, and our feelings are delayed so that we can cope. This type of denial is natural and helps us to survive when we are battling something big. A healthy confrontation of reality can come, but it will be a process and a journey that will take time and can't be forced.

So often we fight fire with fire. We fear anxiety and so we fight against it. We try and power through when we are ill. We fear becoming low and so we use escapism to ignore our emotions. We are in a constant battle, and it is exhausting. But we are all gently invited into a different way of doing things. Yes, we do everything in our power to get better, but when we have come to the end of ourselves, that is when the invitation to acknowledge reality can be so powerful. It is understandable to struggle, it is understandable to breakdown and it is understandable to reach the end of our human limits. But we have permission to let go of the fight against struggle, or from hiding away from it. This then means that our bodies and minds can begin to have the space they need in order to bunker down and get through whatever season we are in. Our feelings don't want to grip us forever. They are made to move on, to pass over us like weather as we learn to give them permission to exist. (It's when we ignore them that they tend to stick around.) Instead of denying reality, we can take comfort in the fact that Jesus himself walked into darkness with open eyes. It is not the end of the story, it will not win, and there is no darkness in us, in our lives or in the world that can remove us from hope or from God’s love.

A little note as I keep learning: As I started gradually trying to live this out I inevitably felt like I had failed when I didn’t do this well. It's really hard to change the habits of a lifetime, and part of me wanted to give up. Here’s the thing: we can look at our fumbled attempts with compassion and a little smile. It’s OK. It is difficult. And this is the whole point. It’s not about always getting it right. It is about making small changes, and then accepting what’s real; whether we manage to shift to better habits or find ourselves back in our old ones. Because God dwells in what is real and journeys with us through the rough and smooth. I believe that transformation can come as we are kind to ourselves, again and again. We are as accepted and loved when we get this right as when we inevitably don’t.

'While I now know that joy is always there, I also know that darkness is a part of life. Darkness is allowed. We're allowed to feel, and naturally will experience sadness and disappointment, fear and anger, embarassment, and go from hysterical laughter to panic within the same day. And when we allow those feelings, the fear of them and of our difficult experience lessens. I could not have changed and transformed if I had ignored the darkness.'

- Miranda Hart, I Haven't Been Entierly Honest with You (A very helpful book if you're going through a dark season.)

'For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

- Romans 8:38-39