Absence my Presence

Writing has always made me feel more alive, more vital and more purposeful. So, here’s an attempt to enliven and encourage my spiritual self (and hopefully others) by giving credence to the pained sceptic that I have so often pretended isn’t a part of myself.

Titling this blog was an obvious choice for me. Throughout the depths of doubt and spiritual anxiety, I have often been reminded of a line I first encountered through the energetic genius of my favourite university supervisor. It comes from Sonnet 60 of Philip Sidney’s 1591 sequence Astrophel and Stella. The title of the poem, ‘When My Good Angel Guides Me’ reads,

When my good angel guides me to the place,

Where all my good I do in Stella see,

That heav’n of joys throws only down on me

Thunder’d disdains and lightnings of disgrace:

But when the rugg’st step of Fortune’s race

Makes me fall from her sight, then sweetly she

With words, wherein the Muses’ treasures be,

Shows love and pity to my absent case.

Now I, wit-beaten long by hardest Fate,

So dull am, that I cannot look into

The ground of this fierce Love and lovely hate:

Then some good body tell me how I do,

Whose presence absence, absence presence is;

Blist in my curse, and cursed in my bliss.

Although this sonnet focuses on romantic love and the paradoxes that permeate it, I find Sidney’s description of love deeply reminiscent of my relationship with God.

Sidney speaks of the ‘heav’n of joys’ when love is present and close, and the comparative ‘lightnings of disgrace’ when love feels distant and absent. The speaker is heartbroken by the bliss of knowing love and the comparative agony of its evasion. In Sidney’s dark times he feels Stella’s presence only as her absence, only as the pain of wishing he felt her, wishing he understood her, wishing she was close.

Although this poem was my introduction to apophatic thinking, it wouldn’t be until years later in the depth of my doubting that I would learn to cling on to the alternative truth of God as an absent presence. My university supervisor asked me to produce 2000 words on those six, ‘whose presence absence, absence presence is’. Luckily, I still love a challenge, and I would like to have another go- in a few less words. And then I would like to try again. And again. And perhaps that is what this project will be- numerous attempts from me to reckon with the fact that often I feel as if I know God’s absence more than God’s presence. That I have more questions than answers. That sometimes God evades me more than I find him, and that sometimes I doubt more than I believe.

And reckoning with the fact that it’s okay. That sometimes the desire to know God and the desperation to understand this brutally beautiful world is all I have to give. That it’s okay if my knowledge of God is an ache where I wish He was, where I want the truth to be, where I want clear and easy answers to be. But after years of living in faith and doubt I understand more and more that life is rarely simple. If I am complex and layered and hurting and precious, how much more so would love incarnate be, the ultimate Being, of whom I am merely a reflection.

If all that is left of presence is a deep longing, desperate to be satiated, I remind myself that it is a presence no less.

I often wonder if it is possible to simultaneously believe in God and not believe in God. To believe that Jesus is there and he cares, and to doubt that he knows my name. The paradox of faith. The agnosticism of belief. The presence of absence.

 I would like to turn to Fulke Greville, a contemporary of Sidney’s who, like the best of friends, understood the same pain as he. He writes, in Sonnet LXIX of his collection Caelica,

My age of joy is past, of woes begun,

Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace;

With them that walk against me, is my sunne

He similarly explores the loss of love. I don’t think that my ‘age of joy’ is past in a concrete sense. I’m not quite that cynical. But I do think that my age of joy in faith, in the sense of an indiscriminate trusting and excitement in God feels far away. Whilst the questions, the tears, the anger, feels close. I’ve read enough of the Bible, especially the Hebrew scriptures to know that ‘woes begun’, very much endure. Pain is woven into the scriptures, sewn into the words. Psalm 22 details an agony so visceral that the heart melts, poured out like water.

This isn’t to say that we don’t also see renewal, but pain in the scriptures isn’t as often stopped by God as it is stepped into. Christ’s ministry, after three years, was cut short by an unimaginable death. A kind of gruesome cruelty it is difficult for us to imagine. A God that doesn’t use his position to protect himself from pain but embraces it, despite immense fear. A God that shows us that death, sacrifice, pain and humility are more full of life than anything else. It is money, status, rules and religious exclusivity that are conversely, full of death.

A strange grace, if there ever was one.

So, when I think about my faith as full of strangeness and doubt, I wonder whether Christ’s might have been also. I think about Greville’s declaration that ‘With them that walk against me, is my sunne’, I recognise the way that I often feel, that God my light, my sun, is against me. But then I remember that Jesus’s God is often present where we least expect him. So maybe it is in fact in my darkness, that there is light.