Why do some individuals hear God's voice in response to sincere prayer, while others call after God only to hear silence? Recent discussions with friends and family has forced this question into my awareness. And in this brief post, I can only offer a personal insight that some may find offensive. The truth of my insight, however, will turn, in each instance, upon the private assessment of the reader. And the quality of the reader's assessment will turn, in each instance, upon his capacity for brutal self-honesty. From the outset, I emphasize that what I write here does not explain every unanswered prayer. Yet, for some individuals--myself included--it explains precisely why many individuals can hear God's call, flee from it, and forget that they had ever heard God's voice. To best explain this insight, I detour into a helpful, hypothetical story.
Imagine a newly wed husband and wife. They excitedly anticipate life together. They both love the other deeply. They clearly recognized this love, and commit to share their lives. Yet, after a brief period of marital bliss, their marriage takes a turn for the worse. From the wife's perspective, the husband suddenly detaches and becomes angry. He invests his time in activities that seem to purposefully exclude her. From the husband's perspective, his wife is no longer the woman with which he fell in love. His anger and detachment arise from this painful fact: he doesn't love her. When asked about his prior love for her, he responds that it wasn't love, but lust, since it didn't endure.
As it turns out, the husband is deeply mistaken about the situation. In fact, he has acted to undermine the marriage and fall out of love with his wife. Why? After the brief period of marital bliss, he realized the depth of commitment made. The marriage requires him to renounce selfishness and to surrender all on the alter of matrimony. His wife reinforced this expectation, asking for his free time, energy, and efforts in building the marriage. Confronted with this demanding obligation, the husband became overwhelmed. Instead of maturing to the challenge, he begins--albeit unconsciously--to behave in ways that undermine the marriage--the source of the onerous obligations.
Again, the husband does not act with full conscious deliberation. He experiences obligation and begins a systematic enterprise of self-deception in which he seeks to escape that obligation without admitting to himself that he is in fact undermining the marriage with this aim in mind. In other words, he deceives himself to preserve the ability to justify his behavior--after all, he doesn't love her anymore. Love begets obligation, and obligation terrifies the husband, causing him to flee. But the husband cannot merely flee from that obligation. His love for his wife will follow him, wherever he goes. The only escape is to erase that love. Only then will his marital obligations disappear.
This self-deceptive flight from marriage is, in fact, similar to what certain existentialists discuss (e.g. Sartre). For those thinkers, when an individual faces his own radical freedom, he also faces the profound obligations that freedom imposes: he must take responsibility for life choices. Most people, when faced with this awful specter, self-deceptively flee into the crowd, allowing a group to direct their life choices. Often, such individuals join groups that loudly trumpet their own individuality and freedom--when in reality they behave as puppets. In short, the self-deceptive flight from life's obligations is real. And if the reader will reflect on the matter, he will see multiple contexts in which this occurs.*
With this insight in hand--i.e. that individuals self-deceptively flee the call of obligation--we can see how it applies to God's call. In my view, many who claim to seek God in vain, are like the husband above. At one time, an individuals seems to enjoy union with God. He confidently declares God's existence, and allows that declaration to shape his life. Yet, after a brief period of discipleship, he begins to detach, doubting what he once seemed to know. He fills his day with activities that exclude prayer and thoughtful study. Eventually, he abandons his faith and proudly proclaims that God never answered his prayers. When asked about the prior religious confidence and apparent union with God--as one could ask the husband about his prior apparent love for his wife--he responds that his confidence and sacred experiences arose from a deep desire for the religion to be true. He, in fact, produced those experiences (or was brainwashed into those experiences) in an attempt to affirm God's existence. Just as the husband explains away his genuine love with recourse to lust, the former disciple explains away his genuine faith with recourse to mere emotion.**
The truth? As it turns out, the disciple acted to undermine his faith. Why? After a brief period of divine union, he realized the depth of the commitment. God demands the disciple to renounce selfishness and to surrender all upon the alter of sacrifice. When the disciple prayed, God did indeed answer. And in that answer--as in the experience of a person's own freedom--the disciple was simultaneously confronted with divine obligations. Confronted with this demand, the disciple became overwhelmed. Instead of maturing to the challenge, he begins--albeit unconsciously--to behave in ways that undermine his faith in and knowledge of God--the source of the onerous obligations.
Again, the disciple does not act with full conscious deliberation. He experiences God's demands and begins a systematic enterprise of self-deception in which he seeks to escape that obligation without admitting to himself that he is in fact undermining his knowledge and faith with this aim in mind. In other words, he deceives himself to preserve the ability to justify his flight from God--after all, he doesn't know whether God exists. Prayer begets knowledge, knowledge begets the terror of divine obligation, and divine obligation engenders the disciple to flee. But the disciple cannot merely flee from that obligation. God's presence surrounds him and the only escape is to erase his memory of God. With his knowledge of God erased, the force of divine obligation subsides.
Many will find what I've said offensive. The reader may say: "this is the typical response by members when asked why people leave the church, viz., 'so they can sin.'" If the reader has this reaction, he has deeply misunderstood my argument. When a husband leaves his wife because of onerous obligations, he leaves, not to sleep with other women, but to escape the demands of the marriage. Likewise, when a disciple flees from God, he flees, not to sin, but to escape God's demands. I can, with great confidence, argue this point. After all, I myself sought to flee from God's call at one time. In retrospect, I can say that I stepped away from God, not because I didn't know whether he existed, but because I did know that he existed, and that knowledge placed too much demand upon me. As Soren Kierkegaard's aptly titled book suggests, when we approach God, God demands sacrifice and that demand makes any individual, even the true disciple, experience "Fear and Trembling."
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*As an additional example, many confronted with the demands society imposes on adults, flee into childish behaviors, avoiding employment and escaping into virtual worlds that can, by their nature, impose no real demands upon them.
**Some may argue that the very idea of self-deception is suspect. How can we purposefully act, while concealing purposiveness of the act? For those who would make this claim, while at the same time affirming our ability to generate spiritual experiences, a more careful reflection on the powers of the human mind is in order.
Very interesting post, Judson. I am not offended by your interpretation, although I am confronted by your argument on many levels. I guess on one level, I'm uncomfortable with it's stance because the whole gist of it seems to rest on the age-old notion of orthodoxy, that self-declared "right-thinking" of institutional religious ignominy. I like the self-reflexive disciple who seriously considers the possibility of self-deception in his relationship to reality (or God, if you will). But I think that principle weighs just as heavily on the disciple who deludes himself about the promises made by his God culture or his relationship to it. I would argue that God can never be dislocated from the human culture that molds and shapes him, indeed gives birth to and murders him. So I think the understanding that there are as many Gods as there are worshippers - that the whole pursuit is at its foundation a subjective one - should present your argument with it's most profound failing. We all mythologize life and craft stories that lend meaning to our experiences and our sense of self. It's precisely what you're doing in the above post. It's beautiful because storytelling conveys something of what it's like to be human, it highlights our perspective or at least the perspective of one group. But herein also lies a weakness. Any single perspective is always limited and finite. As you point out, we usually don't consciously recognize when we have selective memory or when we make assumptions based on bias. Self-deception is part of storytelling because it allows us to invest ourselves in something that's not really happening around us, although we charge the air with its presence by our very perception. It's something we can all relate to. Human civilizations have been crafting adoration cults and employing myths for eons. To my understanding, that is the meaning of human culture in the Latin and it holds a token of wisdom for those who feel to transcend their native paradigms. Still it is not even for these gnostics to judge others of their self-deception. Always I think it is wise to check ourselves in this fashion, rather than assume it in "the other." Any who study cross-cultural religion will recognize the theodicycal apologetic designed to account for God's increasing silence in the world and a spike in sectarian apostasy. I've seen some philosophical pleas pushing back in the same direction and I certainly think there is merit to them. I just think they have far less to tell us about the disciple who "flees" and far more about the mindset of that faithful disciple. One might just as well understand the whole paradigm as "the Disciple who calls, the God who flees!" Because in certain instances of your own religious narrative, you see the divine as fleeing a particular institution, an entire movement. That is the story, nay, the mythology of the Great Apostasy as you know. And of course, in this sense Joseph is exactly the disciple who was called by the God of Orthodoxy circa 1820 and he fled! He fled into heterodoxy and charisma and all the dynamic aspects of spirituality that the institution seeks to control, to curtail. So I guess I'm not saying I think you're wrong. I'm only suggesting that it's a perspective, one which I can relate to on some level in my discipleship but one which I have mostly transcended for myself. If that is in any way partially deception, I only suggest that the language is totally ambiguous and like a mirror, these rhetorical assignments are the very same things reversed. I'm not sure I can put my thumb on it, but I think there's something very meaningful and maybe even truth there.
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... is certainly relatable and a provocative way to ground moral obligation within a believing theistic paradigm. Glad you wrote it!
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