This is an edited version of a paper I presented at the Hearts and Minds Conference at Bristol Baptist College on 13th June 2024.
About a year ago I became aware that something was not quite right in my spiritual life. I felt spiritually dry. Or perhaps 'cold' is a better description. Evangelical Christianity urged me to “hold fast” and “stand firm” in tough times, but my experience was of letting go and falling. When I realised that I would never have a baby, a lot of the things I believed about God were stretched to breaking point. In order to hold on to these truths, I felt that I would have to twist them beyond recognition. So instead I let them go. I didn’t stand firm; I was bowled over and fell through a trapdoor into a different faith universe.
This new universe is a place of brokenness, vulnerability and struggle. Infertility pushed me through the trapdoor, and becoming an adoptive parent pulled up the ladder, removing my way back to the place I once knew. In this new universe, I hesitate to claim that God is in control; trusting God has become problematic; I wonder whether God intervenes in the world at all. And yet, the strange thing is, I would not choose to go back, even if that were possible. I live in a world of vulnerability, struggle and pain: pain that I cannot fix; pain that it seems God cannot fix either. But given the choice, were someone to send the ladder down, I would choose to stay. I would not want to go back to a place where God was kind and everything made sense.
I wrote the following story while I was at a week-long Christian festival, and very angry. I had been through a grieving process and had achieved a degree of acceptance and peace with my infertility. But this conference made a mockery of everything I had endured. It celebrated a theology in which every painful experience ended in a miracle and every story in a satisfying resolution. Prayer unleashed the power of God and petitions were answered. I was enraged. I wrote the story in protest.
The festival was held every year. Christians gathered from all over the country, in church or social groups, to spend a few days together worshipping God. They loved being together; they loved the energy that was generated by so many worshippers gathered together with one purpose.
In the mornings they attended Bible studies taught by world-renowned scholars. People got up early and queued up with their Bibles, notebooks and early morning coffee to hear the great teachers. They listened as gradually their biblical knowledge was stripped away little by little, and they left every session knowing less than they had when they went in.
In the afternoons, many people attended a great marketplace in the middle of the venue where tables were piled high with books, clothing and other supplies. People brought bags of good-quality clothes to be donated to homeless charities; Bibles to be sent to countries where most Christians could not afford or even get hold of a Bible; toys and other trinkets to be sold in charity shops to raise money for good causes. Day by day the piles increased, and volunteers sifted through the mountains of stuff, sorting donations.
It was in the evenings that the really exciting things happened, however. Thousands gathered in the largest of the venues as the worship band began to play beautiful songs of lament. Everyone cried as they wept for love of God’s hurting world. Then someone got up to speak about the power of prayer. People with a special story to tell were invited to step forward. They spoke of chronic illnesses; devastating bereavements; painful failures. Then a time of prayer ministry began. The happy and the whole came forward and people laid hands on them and prayed. The Spirit moved in great power, and they walked away limping. (First published in Gathering up the Crumbs: Celebrating a Century of Accredited, Ordained Baptist Women in Ministry in the UK (Didcot: Baptist Union of Great Britain, 2020 ).
At the time, if you’d asked me to explain the story, I wouldn’t have been able to - it just ‘felt right’. Now, I think I am beginning to understand it. I think the festival is an invitation to apophasis, to the via negativa, to a very ancient spiritual path of stripping, unsaying and unknowing. Festivalgoers are invited to allow the things they thought they knew about the Bible to be stripped away, just as the early medieval writer of the Mystical Theology insisted that every statement about God be set aside. As St Augustine said, “If you can understand it, it isn’t God.” (Williams, p. xvi). In the central marketplace, rather than acquiring more stuff, people are invited to let it go, give it away. The apophatic theme of layers being stripped away resonates here. And, most astonishingly, in the evenings, the happy and whole are invited to come forward and receive a wound. They walk away limping. The festival is an invitation to let go of power, knowledge, certainty, wealth, and even health, happiness and wholeness.
Apophasis literally means ‘away from speech’ and a key apophatic practice is unsaying. This is hard to define but one way of explaining it is a radical scepticism of positive statements we make about God, on the basis that God is ultimately unknowable. Or at least not fully knowable. A major tension for me in coming to terms with my infertility was trying to hold on to certain beliefs about God that seemed necessary for orthodoxy and yet did not hold up in the face of my experience. I believed God to be all-loving and all-powerful: I couldn’t keep my grip on both, so I chose to let one go. It was easier for me to love a God who cared but was powerless in the face of my suffering than one who had the power to help but chose not to. Apophatic unsaying goes further than denial or deconstruction, however. Traditional theology states that God is loving. Experience of suffering casts doubt; maybe God is not loving? Apophatic theology maintains that God is beyond both statements. God is all-powerful, says the tradition. God is powerless, experience seems to suggest. God is beyond power, says the apophatic way.
Another way of unsaying is paradox and poetry. The anonymous writer of the late medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing urges that we put all our human attempts to understand God in a cloud of forgetting beneath ourselves, and encounter a cloud of unknowing above, between us and God. According to this metaphor, God is not the cloud itself but is beyond it. The image of the cloud of unknowing resonates with my experience of finding that the things I used to believe didn’t work anymore; and yet this doesn’t feel like a loss of faith so much as an embrace of uncertainty and ambiguity. Moving from a black and white universe with a sure connection between cause and effect to a universe of shades of grey. The beauty of this metaphor is that it both describes and affirms my new faith universe. The cloud of unknowing affirms that we cannot have clarity or certainty, and those of us who live with uncertainty are not guilty of a lack of faith but rather perceiving how much we do not know. And the promise is that God is still there – beyond the cloud. I am taking refuge in mystery, but embracing and contemplating that mystery rather than “mystery” being the theological equivalent of “pass” - I don’t know the answer.
According to the anonymous author, we can attempt to penetrate the cloud of unknowing with ‘a sharp dart of longing love’ (Anonymous, p. 20), but rather than loving God for God’s good qualities, such as loving kindness or almighty power, instead we seek God for Godself alone:
For although it be good to think upon the kindness of God, and to love Him and praise Him for it, yet it is far better to think upon the naked being of Him, and to love Him and praise Him for Himself (Anonymous, p. 27).
There is a sense in which loving God for God’s love is ‘cupboard love’; loving God for what we get. There is also a danger that we love our idea of God rather than Godself. The surest way to penetrate the cloud of unknowing, according to the author, is simply to reach out to God in love, desiring nothing but God. In this way, perhaps suffering that causes us to lose our grip on the truths we hold about God paradoxically has the potential to bring us closer, because our beliefs about God’s qualities are no longer in the way. We no longer love our idea of God so much and are maybe closer to loving who God actually is.
Let us return to the festival. The marketplace enables the apophatic practice of stripping: taking off and setting aside the layers that come between us and the divine. If I were writing the story now, this stripping would be more costly than simply letting go of unwanted items; the stuff that so many of us accumulate. Giving away what we don’t need doesn’t cost us much; apophatic stripping goes deep. It’s a stripping off of garments: shoes (Moses at the burning bush), outer garment (the female lover in the Song of Songs; Jesus washing his disciples’ feet). More profoundly, it’s a stripping off of sinful habits and attitudes, desires, beliefs, patterns of thinking and false gods (Williams, p. 27). A truly apophatic festival would strip away everything, leaving worshippers naked before God.
And in the evening, the happy and the whole come forward to receive a wound. Why would they choose to be wounded? They wouldn’t, of course: none of us would. And yet there is a sense in which my wounds have created a ‘thin place’; they have opened a portal to another universe where God is more clearly known - or rather, more unclearly known. Suffering has enabled me to contemplate the cloud of unknowing on the other side of which there is God. There is a danger here: that we sanctify suffering and see it as in some way ‘good for us.’ I would not choose to go through again what I went through to become a mother, and yet I would not choose to give up the things that have been revealed to me. Thankfully there is no difficult choice to be made: I am where I am, and I see what I see. There is no going back. I wasn’t consciously thinking of Jacob’s struggle with God in Genesis 32 when I wrote about this apophatic prayer ministry, but the parallels are obvious to me now. Jacob is wounded in his struggle, receives a blessing, and walks away limping. Janet Williams sees a parallel between this struggle and apophatic unsaying: taking each statement we make about God and unsaying it, losing our faith daily and wrestling it back (Williams, pp. 55-6). Perhaps there is no blessing without a wound.
Dr Karen O’Donnell offers an apophatic practical theology of hope in the darkness of miscarriage (O’Donnell, pp. 127-131). She argues that if we accept the present reality of people who have been traumatized by pregnancy loss:
…then we can become hopeless. This sounds negative but I do not mean it as such. In fact, in true apophatic style, I mean it, paradoxically, as an affirmation. We can become hopeless. For it is in hopelessness, in beginning from lived experience and not from skewed sense of hope, that solidarity and action may be grounded (O’Donnell, p. 130).
According to Karen O’Donnell, this solidarity, rejecting quick and easy fixes that make the happier and more whole feel better ‘is a praxis of remaining’, a ‘standing with those who are hopeless and sharing in their hopelessness.’ (O’Donnell, p. 130). It is only when we acknowledge the reality that we can take liberative action. One of the hardest things for me about infertility was the isolation: the ways in which I was alone in an experience others didn’t share and most didn’t want to know about. Adoptive parenting is likewise isolating, albeit in different ways. When people choose to share my sadness by remaining with me in it – not trying to fix it; acknowledging that it cannot be fixed – that in itself is liberative. Perhaps some do actively choose to be wounded when they choose to remain with others in their pain. And O’Donnell maintains that we cannot have liberative praxis without this: we cannot transform a sadness we refuse to acknowledge. The affirmation ‘we can become hopeless’ resonates too. My life now is a series of paradoxes. I am a childless mother (see Ellis, pp. 130-1). My identity as a childless person remains. I am both hopeless and hopeful. Most of my days contain both; sometimes the same moment contains both hopelessness and hope. Apophasis does not force me to choose.
Well, this is all very interesting: so how does this help me, and others like me? Firstly, I have found company in my unknowing; it is affirmed, it is validated. It is an orthodox and very ancient way to approach God and there is nothing wrong with me. Knowing this makes a big difference to me as a disciple. I used to think, and often say, that I was “bad at prayer”. But as I have reflected on my experiences, I have noticed the presence of God. As Richard Rohr says, quoting a friend, ‘God comes to you disguised as your life’ (Rohr, p. 66). I feel the truth of this in my bones.
Secondly, I recognise the gift of living a broken life. Or maybe I should say the gift in living a broken life. The gift hidden within the brokenness. I’m definitely not holy enough yet to thank God for my pain, but my wound has been a thin place through which I have gone deeper with God, and I’m not sure I could have got to where I am now any other way. Reading the Cloud of Unknowing shows me that I have barely begun the work of reaching out to God with a sharp dart of longing love and perhaps bumping into God in the dark (Williams, p. 78).
Bibliography
Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing. Digireads.com, 2019.
Ellis, Kevin. ‘Invisible Pain in Jennifer Tann (ed.), Soul Pain: Priests reflect on personal experiences of serious and terminal illness. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013, pp. 129–145.
Nash, Emma. A Pastoral Theology of Childlessness. London: SCM Press, 2021.
Nomad podcast https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk/nomad-podcast/
O’Donnell, Karen. The Dark Womb: Re-Conceiving Theology Through Reproductive Loss. London: SCM Press, 2022.
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: A spirituality for the two halves of life. London: SPCK, 2011.
Williams, J.P. Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019.
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