Between The Garden Gates

Lately I have been reflecting on my spiritual life as anyone in seminary might do. And though I would like to report that all is well in Eden, I can’t. I think of those times when communion with the God of my experience is in tact; when I have a conscious and continual contact with that-which-cannot-be-named. It is, in a word, beautiful. It is like Eden – fragrant, sweet and peaceful. I feel a Divine presence around and through me as if I were able to walk side by side with God in intimate conversation. It is a feeling of being known down to my innermost thoughts and feelings, and it is good. Here is a warm, peaceful feeling of being embraced by something greater and more powerful than I. I feel like a child sitting on the lap of my father with his huge laborer’s arms wrapped around me. Somehow I understand why the Greeks and Romans built mammoth statues of their gods, because something that would be proportionately large enough to hug me as a 6’3” child with 30” broad shoulders would have to be immense. My “Abba” must be enormous to hold me with such power and strength.

But that is only sometimes. I am reminded daily that I, like the Adam myth of us all, have actively engaged in getting myself thrown out of this wonderful garden. God did not expel me (or Adam) – I did it. I, with my ego-driven, megalomaniacal desire to be lord and master of my own destiny, have driven myself out of Eden. I played (and continually play) god, and that god I pretend to be is what throws me out onto the streets of my desolation. Out here I am alone. I exist inside my insular bag of bones and blood and somehow see myself as distant and apart from others.

It is a nasty and treacherous by-product of having a mind. Mind’s job is to make sense of things, but I believe mine gets carried away. The sense-making my mind goes into starts delineating self from other. Isn’t there space between us? My mind thinks so and therefore deduces that we are separate and, if separate, different. From there the dominoes begin to fall until lives and bodies lie helter-skelter all around me. It is lonely and desolate out here and as Shakespeare wrote, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.”

Or maybe it was the Psalmist who captured the sentiment even more fittingly as, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” But my God has not forsaken me. The Almighty is also infinitely patient and the garden of love and peace waits silently and patiently for me to return. My mind, in its never-ending attempt at sense-making, tries to protect me from the harsh reality of what I have done and blames an uncaring “other” for my calamities. I feel abandoned, alone, cold, frightened. There is no joy out here and the landscape outside the garden is barren and rocky. So I stumble in a zigzag path from rock to thorn bush looking for anything I on which to hang my hopes. I often wonder if I am not the only one out here in the barren wasteland of self-will and I can see why my ancestors made up stories of devils and evil powers at work to capture us lost souls. It certainly feels at risk.

But in my darkest hour, when I am about to give up all hope, I think I see a garden gate ahead of me. Finding my way to that garden is not easy – I am pummeled by all sorts of demons and fears, each taking successively more and more from me until I sometimes feel like I can’t take another hit. It feels at these times as if I am crawling and clawing my way forward on my hands and knees until at last I fall, totally spent, on my face into the garden. But it is not the same garden – this one is different. My new garden is one of surrender and humility; the Garden of Gethsemane. It is a place where I rip at my clothes in vain attempts to throw off the pain, guilt and shame of where I have been. It is a place where at last I come to terms with my “self will run riot” as Bill Wilson wrote.

But nothing happens until, in desperation I open again to God. I give up trying to play god; it just doesn’t work. I surrender. It is at this point that my spirituality begins to return to me. It is here that I start letting God back in, first asking to be relieved of the burdens I have carried, then ultimately surrendering to Divine will, and stepping back onto the real path of spirituality. To be certain, the problems I have created don’t magically disappear, but I am equipped to deal with them in a different and more effective way – through and with the power of that ever-present Divine force and on God’s terms and in accordance to God’s “will.”

Reviewers of the new book Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, might have us believe that even the “saint of the gutters” had a crisis of faith. But I am not so sure it was a crisis of faith as much as it was the correspondence of a fellow trekker telling the truth about what it is like in reality. The reality is that having once seen into the beauty of the garden, all else looks and feels like desolation and desert. Worse yet, the deepest truth is that as humans we continually separate ourselves from God, albeit through all those terribly normal aspects of being human – we evict ourselves. I wish I could say I lived in the Garden, but I can’t – it’s just not the truth. Like the epileptic boy’s father, perhaps like Mother Theresa, I am forced to say, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.” That unbelief is fueled by my realities and pushes me far away from the garden or any Sunday school pretense that life can be a fairy tale.

And so there is no happily ever after to this story, because before I know it, I have gotten myself tossed out again – out of the garden by practicing some sort of self-reliance (that’s a good thing, I was taught). The reality I am faced with today is that my spiritual life – my spiritual quest, as it were – is the journey back and forth between the garden gates. My Garden of Eden being those rare few moments of childlike innocence whenever and wherever I allow myself to be fully embraced by Divine love– the result of putting myself back in God's care, power and love. My Garden of Gethsemane is when (each time) finally I understand that I am not the center of the universe, I am not in charge and I cannot manage without God squarely in the center of my life. The truth is that I spend more time, most of my time, between those two gates than in the Gardens. Out there in the wasteland I am alone and know deeply what Mother Theresa wrote that “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak.” In a strange and sick way, it feels good to know that someone of genuine faith was out here in the desert, felt alone and separated from God’s presence, and wept in pain in her Garden of Gethsemane – just like me. I just thank God that the gate was open and someone left the light on for us.