June 8, 2008

Glynn Cardy

Pentecost 5

‘The valley of the shadow’ is an evocative phrase. I have hiked in steep sided valleys where the sunlight seems to visit for less than a couple of hours in the day. Not that you’d know it, mind you, for the dense bush blocks out the direct light. The vegetation, the animal, and the insect life are very different in such valleys compared to the ridges and the slopes that the sun embraces. The valley of the shadow is an altogether different place.

The phrase ‘the valley of the shadow’ comes from Psalm 23 and refers to despair and hardship in one’s spiritual life. The fuller phrase is ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ and thus it is frequently used at funerals. Death though can be both physical and spiritual. The death of meaning is a spiritual reality. Part of the grief, for example, of physically losing someone close is the spiritual loss of the meaning you gave to each other. Divorce similarly can involve a loss of meaning.

Elie Wiesel is one of my theological heroes. He is a Jewish writer, a Nobel Laureate, and a Holocaust survivor. His best known book is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences in several concentration camps. For ten years after the war he couldn’t write about it. When he did finally write he had trouble finding a publisher.

“I was the accuser,” writes Wiesel, “God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone – terribly alone in a world without God and without humanity.”

As we Christians walk on in our faith we need to wrestle with the implications of the Holocaust. There is the undeniable contribution Christianity made in helping to shape the minds of those who devised, built and ran the death camps, and those who knew they existed but were silent. Christianity had taught that Judaism was wrong, outdated, and killed Christ. Christianity had taught compliance to authority more than it had taught its adherents to protest for human rights. Christianity still all too frequently teaches these things.

In the final analysis though Christianity ‘passed by’ [1] the suffering Jews not because it disagreed with Judaism or felt impotent to intervene, but because Christianity had for centuries projected particularly upon Jews its religious and racial fears and hatred. I fear a similar process is happening today, post 9/11, in projecting religious and racial fears and hatred onto Islam.

However the implications of the Holocaust include more than Christian hegemony, political acquiescence, and the projection of fear and hate. It has implications about God.

Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget that first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”

The God Wiesel accused was religion’s familiar God. The one we Christians usually call Father. This is the God who is all-powerful and all-loving. This God is the one from the ‘Footprints in the Sand’ poster. Remember in the poster how the pilgrim thanks God for walking with him or her but questions why especially during “the most trying periods” there is only one set of footprints in the sand instead of two. And the God replies, “[that’s] when I carried you.”

The Footprints God is one that I hope you all have or will experience. It is a God of comfort. And we often need it.

But this familiar God starts to deconstruct, to crack, in the valley of the shadow of Auschwitz. When children and adults are being brutally slaughtered then God is either unloving or impotent. Usually with that choice we opt for a God who is all-loving and isn’t all-powerful. But what does all-loving look like when indifference, brutality, and suffering have combined to block out all hope?

Wiesel is not alone in this spiritual questioning. A number of Christians over years have written about the absence of God – that is the God they trusted and thought they knew. I think Jesus’ experience on the cross was similar when he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I think we do a disservice to people to pretend that God is always present, even if invisible. There are times when the familiar comforting God is absent. There are valleys in life where there is a different God from the God of the sunny ridge. Indeed in the valley of the shadow the sunny God dies, and the meaning associated with it dies too.

The God of the valley of the shadow though is often hidden, and difficult to explain to those who have never been there. It is more akin to the God by the Jabbok ford in Genesis 32 whom Jacob wrestled with all night and was wounded by. Note the confusion in the text around the wrestler – was it a man or was it God? Tradition has compromised and called it an angel. I prefer to think of it as the-God-whom-Jacob-wrestled-with. That is how the text names the experience.

The word ‘God’ is a way to construct meaning. Some would say we create God in order to have meaning. God becomes a piece of slate onto which we write our assumptions and understandings of life and the world. As the slate metaphor implies this is a fixed, static, compliant God – one who is assumed to be understanding and predictable.

But then something happens. Maybe we move, or maybe God does. Or, as is often the case, trauma comes smashing into our lives extinguishing the light. The slate shatters… maybe replaced by cloud or fire or a wrestling of the soul... but not by anything we’ve known previously as God.

With the shattering of the slate that God is gone. Our assumptions and understandings written and supported by the slate are gone too. The world feels wobbly.

Some then say that the slate God, also known as the true and only God, was a fake. They scrap the whole God enterprise and use their relationships or their needs as the basis of their meaning making.

My advice to fellow pilgrims who have entered valleys of shadows is five-fold:

Firstly, trust your heart. Yes the God you once knew is not here. The meaning associated with that God no longer fits your experience. Don’t discount your experience. That God was flawed.

Secondly, keep walking. Believe that it will lead somewhere and you will one day walk in the sunshine. No one knows how long that will be. Don’t believe those who pedal instant sunshine.

Thirdly, keep your spiritual routines: coming to Church, saying the odd prayer, strolling on beaches, lighting candles. These routines help you keep your balance.

Fourthly, seek out others who know about the absence of God. You might have to find such company in a book, but I hope not. These others won’t give you answers but will give you support.

Lastly, believe too that there is a God in the valley of shadow, and you might first meet that God in the deep reservoirs within your own soul. It might be that which wrestles with you and by which ironically you are both wounded and healed. Or it might not.

[1] The allusion here is to the Parable of the Good Samaritan when the religious leaders passed by the man who was beaten and lying by the side of the road.