The Wall (Eric Stiller)
It is self-revealing to reflect on something I wrote five years ago. Even more so to reflect on the pandemic that prompted it. While the severity of this particular crisis has subsided, the same themes are ever present, for they are the stuff of human experience. We are still awash in unfulfilled longings. We still seek to escape our disappointment through various strategies, especially virtual reality. We are still embodied creatures with embodied hopes. And we are still given the choice of how to respond to the darkness, loneliness, silence, and suffering that inevitably touch our lives.
The pandemic was, I believe, a global example of what is sometimes called a Wall. In a famous book called The Critical Journey, authors Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich discuss the stages of faith. Awakening to God, the Life of Discipleship, and the Productive Life are the earlier stages. But at some point, we enter the Inward Life. It is a stage of questions and doubts. Things that worked in earlier stages no longer work. The only way forward is to go through what they call “the Wall.”
A Wall is a time of crisis, trauma, or suffering. Whatever shape it takes, the Wall is always an invitation to deeper union with God. Regardless of which stage of faith we are in—even if we don’t think of ourselves as religious or spiritual—there will always be Walls in our lives. Whatever other reasons God allowed the pandemic (such things are “too great and wonderful for me”), it presented us all with a collective Wall.
The choice is not whether to encounter the Wall, but how to respond to it. In my original piece, the poet T.S. Eliot loomed large, and he does here as well. In his masterpiece Four Quartets, he writes “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.” Life is full of Walls, because life fills not just with suffering, but also with uncertainty, confusion, and emptiness: the crumbling of earlier certitudes about the world, about life, about ourselves, and especially about God. We all go into the dark.
But darkness becomes the place where God beckons us to grow in Love. Eliot goes on to write, “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you, which shall be the darkness of God.” Eliot was channeling the great sixteenth-century Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross. Darkness can feel like death, as though everything we thought was real and reliable is stripped away. It is a death, but it’s what C.S. Lewis called “good death.” In his classic The Dark Night of the Soul, Saint John of the Cross wrote, “God makes the soul die to all that He is not, so that when it is stripped and flayed of its old skin, He may clothe it anew.” The great question for us is, will we be still and allow ourselves to be stripped and thus made new? Jesus said the same thing when He called us to abide in him, even when the Father prunes us. It’s hard to be still when the knife goes in.
The same Wall, whether a pandemic or a job loss or a relational strain or even just a sprained ankle, will elicit different responses from us, depending on what we bring to it. Often what we bring is a desire to escape the pain through an experience of pleasure, numbness, ecstasy, excitement, tranquility, even “spirituality.” Anything to distract us from the pain of good death.
At the end of Four Quartets, Eliot writes, “The only hope, or else despair, lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—to be redeemed from fire by fire.” One pyre is a living death—the despair of grasping onto a self that cannot endure because it is not rooted in God. The other pyre is a dying life—the hope of God’s purgative love, the “refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2).
Five years on, my sense is that the pandemic offered us a choice of pyre or pyre. The choice is ongoing, because the invitation is ongoing: forsake the living death and embrace the dying life. It is an invitation to the Great Dance. And, as Eliot said, “there is only the Dance.” Shall we take our place?
Eric Stiller is a Carver Project ministry partner and pastor of Central West End Church in St. Louis.
Read Eric’s previous article from 2020: “Waiting with Hope”