Behave “As If”

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief! Mark 9:24

I always get annoyed when people tell me (with smug moral certitude) that if God were speaking to them, they wouldn’t question it, they would just do what He said. To myself I say, “Thank God He is not speaking to them mystically. Otherwise, they would probably become a serial killer.”

In the first place, God DOES speak to us all…in Scripture – and that is the only place you can know with certainty that it is God. If God were to speak to you, the devil would speak to you, too. Unless you have some heavy-duty tools of discernment and obedience, you would end up doing the devil’s work right quickly, for that dark spirit does a far better imitation than you can imagine. It is why I am so prickly about obedience to lawful authority, lawfully exercised. Tricking people into intentional disobedience is, perhaps, the devil’s favorite ploy to snare the selfdescribed pious (though tricking people into blindly obeying illegitimate authority, illegitimately exercised is a favorite stock in trade, too. People would do well to study a little more about the extent – and limits – of legitimate spiritual authority.)

I struggled mightily with my mystical experiences for decades. On the one hand, they could be evidence of a mental defect. If that is what it was, I might be capable of great damage, both to the faithful and to people generally, given my abilities. On the other hand, if they were true and I ignored them, I would be ignoring a legitimate call from God – and that would definitely cause great damage. How to be certain? Let me tell you from decades of experience wrestling with the problem, there is no way to be absolutely certain. Even after I formally committed in a 40-day consecration in the late summer and early fall of 1997, I still struggled for several years with the conundrum.

One of the key drivers of Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant movement, was that he could not abide the idea of “good hope” of salvation: he was determined to have certainty of salvation. The system he devised gave him that certainty, but I had concluded in 1990 that it was a false certainty, one that was every bit as likely to lead to complacency and destruction as to salvation. I was not about to imitate that human formulation.

Here, instead, is what I did: Before I even hit double digits in age I started adopting safeguards. I won’t go through all the tools of discernment I took on, for a lot of it was hit and miss – learn as you go. The cornerstone of everything was obedience. Beginning in 1995, I started adding layers of obedience. Yes, a Priest director or Bishop could err in their judgment, but only a faithless worm would believe that God could not or would not correct that in His own, good, time. Frankly, I believe God sometimes did prompt an authority over me to err for a time – not as a test of them but as a test of me. Was I committed enough to the discipline of obedience to bear error, trusting God would reverse it, or was I committed to “obedience” only when it matched my judgment and discernment?

While all of these internal rules of discernment and obedience did much to protect against self will from running amok, it still did not completely quiet my conundrum. I took great consolation from the 11th Chapter of Matthew, which begins with John the Baptist, imprisoned, but sending disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

This was John the Baptist, who first recognized the Messiah from his mother’s womb; who objected to baptizing Jesus at the Jordan, then obeyed when Jesus told him to do it “to fulfill all righteousness”: who saw the Spirit descend upon Christ like a dove and heard a voice from heaven confirming Christ’s identity. Because much of Jesus’ ministry was not what John expected, near the end, he is plaintively and implicitly asking, “Has my life had meaning, or am I just a nut?”

How much I identified with that plea and am consoled by Christ’s answer! (Indirect, as almost always, but profoundly consoling in its recognition of how impoverished the expectations of even the best of us are while congratulating John greatly for his steadfast obedience and resolve.)

Finally, I considered that the safeguards of discernment were largely in place. After four decades of wrestling with the conundrum, to extend it any further seemed a particularly fruitless exercise, even a distraction. I decided since I could never know with certainty in this life, it was time to quit wrestling with childish things and behave “as if” it were true, respecting all the safeguards.

My situation was tougher than John’s, for though you know of my few public misinterpretations (major ones, but few in number, anyway), you do not know how often and badly I misinterpreted over the decades of training, privately. There was a stretch of years where I misinterpreted every time. As frustrating as it was, that, too, was an integral part of my training. It showed how much we overestimate our own intellectual prowess and seek to impose our will over what we are directed to. It revealed the virtue of persisting even when maddened to tears while surrounded by darkness and error.

When God has a message, it is usually given to children or the simple, in exact words. That was certainly the case in Fatima and Lourdes. Then it is contemplated and analyzed: rejected by some factions in the Church, misinterpreted in others until it is finally definitively rejected or accepted by the Church. This process and the controversy that always surrounds it ought to trigger a great humility in us, that even definitively authentic things, given in the most simple, straightforward terms, are brutally hard for the wisest of us recognize or understand. When God holds out a mission to someone, He usually speaks with enigmatic ambiguity (even when He seems to speak plainly), demanding you use your whole heart, mind, spirit, and soul to figure it out and serve Him and His people well.

Why does He do that? It is not in order to confuse you, but to force you to abandon some of your unconscious assumptions and think a little more like He does. Then, when you reach a decision point and are still not sure, you are NOT free not to act, but have to make your best judgment, trusting that He will bring good from it even if you err, so long as you submit to Him in acknowledging your flaw when you realize it. Both Moses and Abraham messed up frequently…yet kept on going regardless. Job did not mess up much, but was denounced, prodded, and ridiculed by his pious friends who were so blinded by their assumption of what God must be like that they never probed what God is like in reality – and why. They so annoyed the actual God that He would not accept their prayers of repentance, but forced them to ask the very man they had persecuted to pray for them before He would hear them.

I know some people who, I believe, receive at a particular time an authentic mystical message. They are, indeed, awed, but instead of living the fear and trembling that is appropriate to being in the presence of the living God, they decide they are now the experts on God’s will and what He means. It is like a first grader deciding he now is qualified to be a nuclear physicist because he knows something about math. Rather than dominating things, they become useless for serious work. There are less than a handful of people I know in the country who I always listen to (while not always agreeing with) because I think they do receive mystical experiences AND treat them with the proper awe and their interpretation of them with the proper humility.

The lot of someone with a genuine, mystical mission is to frontload a ton of sacrifice and ridicule, trusting that God’s glory will be revealed in the end – and you will then receive your portion of it. To endure, you must make the decision to behave “as if” it were all true after making allowances for correcting the many errors you will make along the way. The only thing strong enough to sustain such a purpose is love – of God and of His people. If it is love of glory or riches which drives you, you will fall away so quickly it will not amount to even a weekend of service. If you are puffed up with pride and certainty, you have already fallen away whether you know it or not.

How, then, to behave “as if”? Following God develops some things that must be true and a largeness of spirit. Live them regardless of the setbacks, attacks, ridicule, and contention that must be yours. Fight with solidarity against attacks on the faith and the faithful without wishing destruction on anyone, only redemption. Do this knowing that sometimes your battles must be existential, while seeing it as a loss anytime that must be.

Take the passage from Isaiah that was the first Sunday reading earlier this month:

Thus says the Lord:
Say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
He comes with vindication;
With divine recompense
He comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
The ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing.
Streams will burst forth in the desert,
and rivers in the steppe.
The burning sands will become pools,
and the thirsty ground, springs of water.
Isaiah 35:4-7

If you believe this, why are you afraid? Would it not be better to walk confidently, determined to cooperate in your little way with God that this may be ushered in?

Contemplate this and know why my key saying, “Acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope” is not just a saying, but an instruction manual for behaving “as if.” Live that with fortitude and resolve and the valley of death we must now traverse is not a bitter ending; it is the prelude to glory. Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief.