The Dark Night

I have begun preparations for a class, on the book of Romans, which I will be leading beginning in January. When my associate from church and I were at the emergent conference on Paul back a few months ago, he picked up a book on Romans by the theologian Dr. A. Katherine Grieb.

I haven’t read enough of the book to really make any good comments yet. Though this quote which she included at the beginning of second chapter is worth sharing, It is from Rowan Williams.

The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your “religious” world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of a purchase on God, you are still playing games.

Rowan Williams¹

I don’t know about you, but that pretty much breaks every leg I try to stand on. Today I was having a conversation with my wife about our Sunday school class. I hadn’t really been involved in this type of thing (by thing I mean a traditional church class which meets in a traditional church building on the traditional Sunday morning scheduling, even though my associate & our teacher Jonathan G. has tried to make it nontraditional) for a while, so I forgot where the saying “a sunday school answer” came from. I had a sense of frustration that the class was on the proverbial {spiritual} road to nowhere, that is if there is a sense of movement at all. It doesn’t seem that our lives—my life especially since that is the one I can most readily and honestly speak about—are changing. I feel like we are letting the good news pass us by every week, as we open up the realm of the new kingdom, only to walk away back to our old shabby kingdoms we have made for ourselves.

Lord that we may leave the realm of our understanding so we may find you waiting for us outside. No matter if it requires walking through the shattering of everything holy and dear to the old kingdom.

Thy Kingdom come Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

1. I found it in Grieb, A Katherine, The Story of Romans (Louisville: WJK, 2002) 19. though it is originally published in Rowan, Williams, “The Dark Night,” A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and  Reflections (Boston: Cowley, 1995) 82. [↩]