Gloom, Despair, and Hope

I don't know about you, but sometimes I get discouraged, downhearted, despairing.  Sometimes the weight of life and ministry with the crushing burdens of living in a complex and fallen world are so heavy that it's hard to pray, hard to preach, hard to proclaim the good news. In fact, for many, maybe most of us, there are dark times when God seems absent, when it's hard just to show up and do the ministry stuff to which we are called. It can fill us with doubt, these moments of darkness and bleakness, those times of gloom and heaviness.  We may question our faith, our salvation, our very existence as children of God. Enduring such an experience is terrifying, making us feel abandoned, and yet, it is also totally normal.

Yes, I said totally normal. On June 27, 1766, John Wesley penned a darkly honest letter to his brother Charles in which he expressed his personal descent into the depths using a mixture of shorthand, Greek, Latin, and French. He lets his guard down with stark frankness to his main partner in ministry, the one person to whom he can freely express his spiritual struggles.  Feeling the strain of worsening marital discord, dealing with "enthusiasts" whose theology and actions brought Methodism into disrepute, traveling into sometimes hostile locales with disappointing results, and shouldering the onus of leadership with less and less input from Charles left him exhausted and discouraged. As found on the website of Northern Nazarene College, the extraordinary letter reads in part as follows, with brackets to indicate abbreviations and shorthand notations --

In one of my last I was saying I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) [I do not love God. I never did]. Therefore [I never] believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore [I am only an] honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the foboumenoi Qeon. ['Those that fear God.'] And yet to be so employed of God! and so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there never was such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I [ever have had] that faith, it would not be so strange. But [I never had any] other elegcos of the eternal or invisible world than [I have] now; and that is [none at all], unless such as fairly shines from reason's glimmering ray. [I have no] direct witness, I do not say that [I am a child of God], but of anything invisible or eternal.

And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am feromenos, ['Borne along.'] I know not how, that I can't stand still. I want all the world to come to on ouk oida. ['What I do not know.'] Neither am I impelled to this by fear of any kind. I have no more fear than love. Or if I have [any fear, it is not that of falling] into hell but of falling into nothing.

This searingly painful letter is a good indication not that John lacked faith or that he was a fake Christian but rather that he was human, frail, and in need of the One to whom he directed his every thought, word, and deed. Rather than pinning his hope of salvation to his inner emotional temperature, he put his trust in Christ whom he knew to be ever faithful.  And no sooner does he give his anxious cry of the heart from a very dark night of the soul than he swiftly returns to an account of the work to which he knew he was called, encouraging his brother and seeking Charles' help so that he can continue onward. 

O insist everywhere on full redemption, receivable by faith alone consequently to be looked for now. You are made, as it were, for this very thing. Just here you are in your element. In connection I beat you; but in strong, pointed sentences you beat me. Go on, in your own way, what God has peculiarly called you to. Press the instantaneous blessing: then I shall have more time for my peculiar calling, enforcing the gradual work.

If you care to look, you can find harsh words of criticism leveled against John Wesley because of this letter by those who seek to discredit his life and ministry by calling him a heathen, a hypocrite, a fraud, and a false Christian.  They seem to think that the life of the faithful is one long round of one joyous experience after another and that admitting to doubt or fear or discouragement is a sign of faithlessness and false religion.  I beg to differ.  Scripture (like the Psalms, for example) bears witness to the cry of the heart from human beings who endured all they could stand and who turned their voices towards God in their pain no less than in their joy, hoping and trusting in God's goodness even when they could not clearly see a way forward, even when their hearts were breaking, even when the darkness seemed to overwhelm the light.  It is in that tradition that we, no less than John Wesley, make our stand, pinning our hopes to the God whose Spirit is the Giver of true life and unending light that can never die or be extinguished.  And that's about as real as it gets, here as we stand poised on the brink of the Advent season, in the bleak midwinter, when we celebrate with hope the coming of the light of Christ into the world.