On Sunday I went to a Pentecostal church. I arrived early and sat in the back of the cold and beautiful sanctuary, gazing at the giant cross which hung over the pulpit. As people came in, I was greeted warmly and welcomed several times, for which I was grateful. I was the only white person there and I did not want to intrude on their community. But something in me felt deeply at home. If you have been raised with any kind of charismatic influence, there is a Spirit-filled essence in this kind of church which reaches across various cultures. At 10AM the music started suddenly, and an uproar began which overwhelmed my senses and made hot tears form behind my eyes. “THANK YOU LORD!!!!!” A woman in an orange dress and four-inch heels sang, before raising her voice to a kind of scream which left no room for ambivalence or trepidation. The pastor called those who had a request for the Lord to come forth to the altar, or the edge of the stage as it is more accurately described in a Protestant church. There, among the swell of voices and outpouring of gratitude for God’s salvation, I stood among the others with their arms raised and eyes closed. The pastor approached each one of us and laid a hand on our foreheads, as a woman stood behind to catch anyone who might be “slain in the Spirit.” This is the phrase that describes what happens when a person is overtaken by the Holy Ghost, and feels the healing pass through him, and crumbles to the ground.
I did not fall to the ground that day, but I was deeply relieved to be in a place where worship was unrestrained. It reminded me of stories I had heard from my father’s side of the family, Adirondack Methodists who talked about people running up and down the aisles in an ecstatic spree. My father eventually stopped going to church, leaving behind the fundamentalist revivalism in which he had been raised. But he has remained a profoundly spiritual and Christian person, and a charismatic. I remember him mowing the lawn when I was a child, before playing Bach’s Mass in B Minor from the porch stereo and walking onto the freshly cut grass, his arms raised to the sun in worship of God’s creation. I remember too one day after school when he came home, his knees bloodied from stopping to help fix a stranger’s broken-down car on the rainy road. One afternoon when I was in middle school, he told me how he had encountered an old woman hitchhiking and picked her up. He spent an hour with her, and reported that he was convinced that the spirit of his late mother was somehow in this woman, and that God had given him the chance to speak with her again.
In his young adulthood my father developed a fanaticism for William Blake. At one point he won a money prize for his collection of Blake books, with which he went and bought more Blake books. Blake had a brother named Robert who died at an early age, and my father had also lost a beloved brother when he was only eighteen. I think he saw in Blake a way to make sense of his charismatic upbringing: that in becoming an educated person he did not have to reject it completely, but perhaps deepened it by the discovery of the brilliant mystic poet steeped in supernatural life.
Anyone visiting our house while I was growing up might have thought they were entering the Church of William Blake. My father and I were really a sect of two, a pair of deeply anti-institutional ecstatics whose devotion to the Holy Spirit infused everything we did. There were Blake engravings and watercolors in every room. He enlisted a painter friend to make reproductions for him, and he asked me to make Blake drawings as well on holidays and birthdays. This was Christianity for him: something deeply spiritual and miraculous and full of charity, but at the same time completely lawless. He replaced the Bible fundamentalism of his childhood with the libertinism of the artist. Indeed, the one fundamental law of our family was this: that you must never give up on being an artist, that you must never forsake the risk and calling of being an artist for the mundanity and mediocrity of a regular career.
I suppose there comes a time in each Christian’s life when she must question the version of the faith that she was raised with, and ask herself not only what she really believes, but what is indeed the Truth. I speak not as a theologian or an academic, but as someone who spent the better part of my disturbed youth chain-smoking out the window of a railroad apartment and working retail jobs. The many Christian churches I have visited are what inform my experience. And each denomination that I have spent time in has given me something beautiful. Every genuine believer that I have encountered has given me something I will keep.
For several months I attended an Episcopal church in New York City. It was there that I heard the ancient text of the Mass for the first time, sung by a female priest. The Wesleyan church that my cousins attend, still standing in the upstate New York town with streets that bear my family’s name, connected me to my roots and made me feel deeply at home. The sponsor I had for two years in a recovery program was Greek Orthodox, and it was through him that I learned what it meant to kiss the cross on Good Friday.
But it was through what is known in America as the black church that I came back to the faith. After years of wandering through the wilderness of witchcraft and nature worship, which despite its waywardness had given me a much-desired sense of the numinous, my life hit bottom and I entered into a situation which left no way out. That is to say, no human way out — for I was powerless on my own to exit circumstances which would have resulted in the destruction of my soul and my hope, from which the only way out in the natural sense would have been suicide.
But God saved me. I remember being in my teenage bedroom, having moved back home after my life fell apart, and clutching a necklace given to me by my great-grandmother, one of the first people to evangelize to me when I was small. “God, please help me. God, please help me,” I repeated, cowering on the bed, not believing, but perhaps believing just enough to be saved. Several weeks later I had found a counselor at a women’s domestic violence nonprofit who listened quietly as I explained the trouble I was in. Our sessions went on for seven months. She was a woman who had grown up in the Bronx and lost her father at an early age. She was not supposed to speak of the faith in that secular setting, but one day I made an off-hand comment about something in my Christian past. I said something which indicated that I was wondering about God.
She started writing on a post-it note as I spoke. I remember thinking that she was no longer listening to me. But after a minute she handed me the piece of paper.
For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11
And then, underlined:
Read daily.
I still have that note. And this woman came the closest anyone has ever come on the human plane to saving my life. I started attending a prayer group she led at Panera Bread on weekday nights. There, I held hands with other women as we studied the Word, asked for miracles and supported each other. One evening a man laughed at us as he walked by with a tray of food. “Okay, Satan!” My friend said with a smirk.
Those women taught me how to recognize the voice of God in my own prayer life. They taught me that the inner voice of God is calming, steadfast, and can be trusted. It is never frightening or threatening. I also learned from them how to recognize the presence of the Enemy and respond to a spiritual attack. I learned how to distinguish between voices that had sent me into confusion for years.
Looking back, there was also more than a touch of prosperity gospel in this setting. “God has money with your name on it!” “Don’t ask for a Honda — ask for a Mercedes!” “You ARE enough!” were phrases I heard. Some of these sentiments indeed spoke life into me at the time, for I was jobless and needed to hear those things.
But it is striking how different this interpretation of Christianity is from the ancient and monastic forms of the faith that I have recently encountered. “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed,” is the phrase that is uttered in the moments before taking the host into one’s mouth in the Catholic Church. Saint Benedict’s sixth step of humility for monks is that they should be content with the most basic and lowly versions of everything.
Being for numerous years not only politically homeless but also a churchless Christian, and wanting to make a deeper commitment, I have often asked myself if what made most sense was to adhere to the denomination of my family — namely, the mainline Methodism of my mother or the more evangelical Wesleyan Methodism of my father. But do I believe what Wesley believed? Upon deeper inspection, I found that the eighteenth-century Anglican founder of the Methodist movement desired to dispose of precisely that element within Christianity which is my greatest solace. He opposed the idea of the “dark night of the soul,” or the fourth of the five mystical stages that describe the journey toward God.
Awakening
Purgation
Illumination
The Dark Night of the Soul
Union with God
Wesley endorsed the first three stages, according to “Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition” by Robert G. Tuttle. And he associated the fifth stage, in which one reaches Christian perfection, with the “entire sanctification” doctrine of the Holiness movement which lives in charismatic and Pentecostal churches today. To be entirely sanctified means that one lives without sin. It is the result of a second baptism in the Holy Spirit that follows the first baptism of conversion. But Tuttle writes that Wesley “detested the vain irrational philosophy” of the “dark night of the soul,” in which a kind of death or descent into the underworld is experienced. In this state, a Christian often lacks the sense of God’s presence. Wesley thought that such “mystical notions” were opposed to “reason,” and looked down on this form of spirituality as a “retreat from the world.” He objected to its “passivity,” its lack of focus on social works, its state of “dreamy reverie in which the soul, devoid of personality, swoons away into the unseen.” This is a Christianity devoid of its shadow side. “Whereas the mystics include darkness among the afflictions of God,” Tuttle writes, “Wesley once again strongly affirms that in spite of all affliction one need never leave or lose the light of God.” The Methodist founder corresponded with suspicion about “some of those that are called ‘mystic writers’ who abound among the Roman Catholics. These are perpetually talking of ‘self-emptiness … self-annihilation,’ and the like.” “Darkness is never the will of God,” Tuttle writes of Wesley’s belief. Rather, any spiritual darkness is the result of “failure.” Wesleyan Protestantism therefore promotes a Christianity in which a faith-filled person is “always conqueror.” It is a Christianity in which “all is midday.”
But who would want to live in a perpetual midday? Who would want to never again see the full moon rising over a city or a meadow, or see the nighttime dew on the morning’s flowers? Who would want to give up the silence of the night?
I would rather be whole than good. —Carl Jung
I remember a monk I met this spring speaking about an American televangelist who had characterized Christ as “the most successful religious figure of all time.” When questioned about the cross and Christ’s suffering, the televangelist replied, “Oh no. He overcame that. He put all that behind him.” The monk went on to explain that there is another version of Christianity, one more “satisfying” and “integral,” in which the marks of Christ’s (and our) suffering remain, even once we are risen. Our dark interludes “have made us who we are,” he said softly. “We do indeed hope to enter heavenly bliss, but not as though only the good parts of our lives will remain intact.”
I am looking for an omnivorous Christianity, not a Christianity that resembles an ever-narrowing elimination diet. I am looking for a Christianity that is not only about conquering, but about brokenness and solace in that brokenness. A Christianity that is not about surpassing affliction but transcending it. A God who listens and absorbs rather than fixes and forces. A faith that will not abolish the faith of my ancestors but fulfill it. A Christ who absorbs violence rather than eliminating it. A healing that is willing to contain even the parts of me that don’t want to heal. A whole Christianity that leaves none of me behind, the way the ancients used every part of an animal.
No precise surgical removal, leaving only the strengths, is possible. —Celeste Marcus
I aim not to crush my physical passions, but sanctify them. Through theosis, an Eastern doctrine of deification, even dark things and defects are divinized. Someone at a party recently spoke to me of a person who had been imprisoned. In his cell, he used his chains to recite the rosary prayer. This via crucis, or way of the cross, does not discard what is destructive, but uses it for a holy purpose. I am interested in a Christ who can transform a tool for torture into a means of speaking to God — in a Christ who not only breaks chains, but transmutes them.
Let us redeem the work of the beloved saint, Spanish mystic John of the Cross, by reprinting in full his masterful “Dark Night of the Soul.” This beautiful poem, written in the late 1570s, is often accompanied by John’s own analysis of his verse and explanation of the mystical stages.
I.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.
II.
In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now at rest.
III.
In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.
IV.
That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,
And where none appeared.
V.
O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.
VI.
On my flowery bosom,
Kept whole for Him alone,
There He reposed and slept;
And I cherished Him, and the waving
Of the cedars fanned Him.
VII.
As His hair floated in the breeze
That from the turret blew,
He struck me on the neck
With His gentle hand,
And all sensation left me.
VIII.
I continued in oblivion lost,
My head was resting on my love;
Lost to all things and myself,
And, amid the lilies forgotten,
Threw all my cares away.
Note that Stanza VI describes a mystic’s heart as “kept whole for Him alone.” Kept whole. “Whole” is the meaning of the word “integral” that the monk used, and the meaning behind the word “catholic,” even in its small-c sense. How can one truly love God without being whole? How can one surrender to God if the surrender is not all-encompassing? Is it not better to be whole than to protest? It is often said of Christians who return to their roots by becoming Catholic or Orthodox that they are coming into the “fullness of the faith.” Perhaps a more apt description is that they are returning to its wholeness.
If I descend into the underworld, you are there. —Psalm 139:8
There needs to be something transcendent about a church. If it is reduced to a mere civic organization, something is lost. What attracts me in Christianity is the charismatic strain found in the Holiness and Pentecostal churches and the mysticism of the ancient monastic traditions. If trying to make a justice warrior out of an artist is like trying to force a flower to become a vegetable, the same can be said of reducing a contemplative to a social worker. On the monk-aesthete horseshoe, the opposing points bend toward each other, with utilitarianism in the middle. Spirituality for spirituality’s sake is viewed negatively. But in the work of Saint John of the Cross, often called the “mystic’s mystic,” I have found an Aesthetic Christianity I cannot live without.