Desert of the Navajo Nation in Arizona
One of the things I learned from Juan Luis Segundo, in his book The Liberation of Theology, is that one of the great difficulties of living an authentic and meaningful life is that we are never able to bring pure questions about our lives to God, to Scripture, to others.
From the time we are born we are constantly being fed “ideology,” which is defined by Mirriam-Webster as “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture.” Thus we never are able to raise our questions in a “pure” form, because we already come with our various ideologies, which, as Segundo points out, have a way of “hiding reality.”
The summer after my freshman year in college I spent a month hitch-hiking around Europe. Like nearly all Americans I had been raised to believe we were the greatest nation made up of the most knowledgeable and intelligent people. I soon found that many Europeans knew a lot more about the world than I did, and they didn’t think our nation was doing the right thing by fighting the war in Vietnam.
By the time we are able to vote we have already been exposed to countless political ideologies from our parents, community, and the media. By the time we are able to read the Bible we have already been told hundreds of things we are supposed to believe about God, life, and the world. By the time we are old enough to try to decide what we should do with our lives vocationally, we have already been told thousands of times what we are good at and what we aren’t, what jobs make money and which ones don’t, what kinds of work are prestigious and which aren’t, and, more than likely, exactly what others close to us think we should do.
The same applies to the two most meaningful questions a human being can ask. First, who is God, what is God like, and what is my relationship to God to be? Secondly, how should I live my life in terms of what I do, what I support, what I work for, what I give myself to?
This is why apophatic spirituality is so important. The first step of it is emptying, of entering the desert by relinquishing as much as we humanly can all our images and concepts of God, all of the ideology we carry within us about the meaning of life. In the words of Lane, we try to become an “inner desert.” “To become an inner desert is to abandon the rampant race of thoughts, feelings, and worries that continually distract the soul from attentiveness to God.” [p. 12] The Scriptures talk about “kenosis,” which comes from the Greek and means “self-emptying” or “purging,” as Jesus emptied himself of the attributes of God in becoming human. [Philippians 2:5-11]
What is it about our human nature that leads us to think everything is set? Most people, if asked, would say, this is what God is like, this is what my relationship to God is like, and this is what I am doing with my life. But that is not what relationships are like. It is not what life is like.
My wife is different now than she was 10 years ago, let alone the nearly 25 years ago when we were married. My children are changing all the time. I could not have a meaningful relationship with my kids or wife if I assumed they were never going to change. For that matter, I am changing all the time myself, which only complicates matters even more.
To have a meaningful and dynamic relationship with God means to be constantly emptying ourselves so that God can speak to us anew. The same goes for our vocations and what we choose to do with our lives. If we are able to empty ourselves and open ourselves to God, we may just find that God has all kinds of exciting things for us to do in the world, and we may even find that God can open us to see the world in news ways. More than likely there are real faults with the ideologies with which we were raised, and the ideologies we have clung to since.
Lane talks about the difference between our jobs and our vocation. [pp. 80-81] Our jobs are what we are paid to do. Our vocation is what God is calling us to do. If we are fortunate, the two may overlap, but they will never be identical, and, for many people, they are far apart. The spiritual question tries to go deeper, and constantly wants to know what God might be calling us to do in the present. This will have to do with not only how we spend our time and exert our energy and love, but also with what causes we support in the social, political, and economic world. If we remain open to God, even out politics may change, hard as that may be to believe. The quest for truth should never be abandoned, and will not be by the one able to become an inner desert as one opens oneself up to the mountaintop revelations God seeks to give us.
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