The Absence: An Advent Meditation on Faith, Doubt and Uncertainty

The presence of an absence—I first heard that phrase used at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to describe the vanished Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, an absence felt as an enduring rebuke to easiness. In an infinitely happier way, it is what you might experience at the Abbey of Gethsemane, in the sanctuary and the halls of the guest quarters, in the garden and in the acres of fields and hills that surround the monastery—a sense that in the pregnant silence that pervades the place there is concealed something protean and organic, concealed because you have to befriend this silence and listen to it, something truer and more real that you have known in the realm of sound and fury that most of us live.

 The place has that kind of effect on people, in part certainly because silence—like its sister, solitude—is experienced infrequently by many, for whom these monastic staples are vaguely shameful. I went to Gethsemane for the first time, two autumns ago, uneasy about a long weekend of total silence, solitude, and what I anticipated as mandatory solemnity, and left after three days feeling I had been on a month-long vacation. I live happily in the wired world of the Internet and smart phones, of argument and opinions and words—words, words, words—and appreciate all the ways that humans make noise in the world, but you can’t really know the extent to which this noise is a burden and a distraction until, for so little as a day, you turn it off.

But I don’t doubt that many others experience the silence of Gethsemane—or silence and solitude wherever they seek it out—quite differently, as the absence of a presence, empty of greater meaning, and resist what they regard as the tricks of the mind to fill the void with comforting emanations from without. And they are happy to regard the silence as a blessing in itself, a vacation from noise and bullshit and exhortations to empty one’s wallet.

More and more do I experience it that way myself. There were times in the past, including times of my most momentous and fateful decisions, when I felt—or imagined I felt—something like what some people have described as the “hand of God” at work in my life. I believed, or convinced myself to believe, that I was “doing God’s will.” In silence, I was aware of a presence.

Not so much anymore. Absence is what I have become aware of, absence and randomness—which is the awareness of the absence of order, of a rational scheme to things—and the indifference of nature. Age certainly has something to do with this. So too does being a parent; this experience does all kinds of things by way of making you more human, and one of those things is to make you starkly aware (as opposed to merely intellectually cognizant) of how little control you have…over anything. It is one thing to nod your head when you hear that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that bad things happen to good people, and even to accept that despite all your good intentions bad things have happened to you, but it is quite another thing altogether to realize that your child’s life is subject to a fate that is entirely random and capricious and utterly indifferent to the annihilation of your heart.

 Losing my parents likely has had something to do with it as well; one does feel, even at 50, orphaned, adrift from one’s moorings, out at sea. I recall when my mother died two summers ago I went to look out at Lake Erie, wondering if I might sense something of her presence; instead what I felt, if anything, was her leaving. A strong wind was up that morning and the brush and tall grass that cover the slope leading down to the lake, and the weeds and shrubbery between the rocks of the breakwater were blowing about madly. My mother had had a long decline that was painful to watch since she had left us in every essential way long before she actually died, and I could only think that if there was any emanation at all it was that of her spirit, released at last from old age and the clutches of modern medicine, somewhat violently shaking loose of the world. And, of course, the death of one’s parents leaves you with a clearer vision than before that your own little narrative also has a beginning, middle and an end.

 And yet I am not (I hope) talking about an absence of faith, not talking about the “loss” of my faith, only about the forfeit of what I hope to say are the shallower promises of “certainty,” which I also hope to say is a counterfeit of faith. Absence, darkness, skepticism and doubt, an acute perception that you and I live on the edge of a precipice and that there are a thousand and one ways that people will slip and fall—these may be obstacles to certainty (if that’s what you want) but to faith I don’t believe they are so much obstacles as the cold, sharp stepping stones to a deeper one.

Absence is written into the Judeo-Christian sacred stories: Jonah in the belly of the whale; Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane; and most hauntingly in the cry from the cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”  St. John of the Cross’ La noche oscura de la alma has made the “dark night of the soul” a staple of the language of discipleship. And the signature music of the Medieval period, assumed to be a era of credulity and unquestioning belief, seems to me to be a music of absence; the silences and hollows and mournful echoes of the Gregorian plainchant reflect an era that understood better than ours that life could be cold, harsh and random, that G-d could seem to be absent.

Still, faith is allied in many minds with certainty, with fiery conviction, with a refusal to entertain doubt, a refusal to rest easily with the absences in silence. Faith-as-certainty is not a modern phenomenon by any means—it is a (dangerous) temptation anywhere, anytime of any faith whose object is one of ultimate concern—nor is it by any means exclusive to any particular brand of faith. But living as we do in an age when religion has been politicized and weaponized—and the weapons to which it might lay claim are ultimate—it should not be surprising that in the decade since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, this notion of faith-as-certainty has come to be viewed as frightening and dangerous.

And we have witnessed in our time as a counterforce a new confidence of atheist writers and thinkers—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris among them—who have prompted many closeted doubters who have been silently seething beneath the noisy cultural dominance of religion to come out and declare themselves as skeptics. Leave aside for the moment that they speak with their own brand of certainty; speaking personally, I think (as I have said elsewhere on this blog) this is a positively good development for faith by forcing it, so to speak, to clear its voice and say what it means, and what it doesn’t mean, and to confront its contradictions and stupidities. Moreover, to the extent that anyone comes to their atheism or their skepticism honestly, through soul searching and contemplation, and are honest in their assertions about their reverence for science and reason (for these are what atheists typically claim to hold in highest regard) it must be admitted that they are taking their lives and their souls and the questions of faith more seriously than do many people whose religious convictions are reflexive and automatic.

Now, I have read “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens (he was a favorite writer of mine, apart from his ideas about faith; his recent death is an enormous loss) and I did not think it was a brilliant piece of work. He reads the Bible in as hamfisted a way as any fundamentalist, and misses entirely great themes of scripture—the liberation of peoples from bondage and servitude in the Old Testamant; the radical way in which Jesus continually transgresses against the cultural norms and power structures of his day in the Gospels; the transcending of religious tribalism and racial boundaries that marks the apostleship of Paul and the growth of the early church—that he might, as a humanist and internationalist, have appreciated.

But Hitchens, who liked to mock the “celestial dictatorship” that he says people of faith are wishing for, has an argument that the faithful should confront, and which is directly relevant to whether faith can encompass doubt and skepticism. The argument is this: The fascist and totalitarian instinct in politics and society is related to the human wish for an Absolute Answer that will absolve us of the uncertainty, doubt and ambiguity that plagues us in life, the wish for a Presence that will fill up all of the absences we feel in human existence. That kind of Presence, abolishing uncertainty, is bound to be tyrannical; HItchens compares the image of G-d to that of “Big Brother,” and denounces with disgust the fact that religion (so he claims) commands us to “love that which we also fear—the essence of sadomasochism.”

In this, Hitchens and his atheist compatriots are arguing against faith-as-certainty, and I can only say that to that extent their point is inarguable. The disciples of something like a Celestial Dictatorship, eager to inflict their version of The Truth on everyone around them, are legion. But it is also more than arguable that their certainty is not the faith of the Bible, and that the Celestial Dictatorship described by Hitchens is not the G-d who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

What, then, is faith if it is not about “certainty”? For myself, I find it useful to think of faith not as a matter of assenting to certain creeds or beliefs, but as fidelity, an intentional “staying with”—staying with the difficult marriage or relationship, the hopeless or perilous situation, the friend or stranger in need. Think of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane lamenting that none of his friends would stay awake with him. Think of it also as an intentional staying with—or staying awake to—life itself, of living with eyes wide open, a determination to participate fully in one’s life, whatever its circumstances or trials, and however full of darkness and absence it may at times seem.

In the novel To Know a Woman by Israeli author Amos Oz there is a charming depiction of a secular version of something like this kind of faith-as-fidelity. Yoel Ravid is a middle-aged widower, taking care of his aged mother and mother-in-law and teenage daughter in the wake of his wife’s death under mysterious circumstances. In the last pages, after a convoluted plot reaches an ambiguous resolution, we see Yoel working as a volunteer in a hospital, comforting patients and doing various odd jobs.

The first few times he was mainly set to work in the laundry….Yoel’s job was to sort out what had to be boiled and what needed a delicate wash. To empty the pockets of the dirty pajamas. And to enter on the appropriate form how many sheets, how many pillowcases, and so forth. Bloodstains and filth, the acrid smell of urine, the stench of sweat and other body fluids, traces of excrement on the sheets and pajamas, patches of dried vomit, medicine stains, the intense whiff of tormented bodies—all these aroused in him neither disgust nor loathing…He yielded himself to it with silent elation: I am alive. Therefore I take part. Unlike the dead.

The novel’s conclusion has a pleasant convalescent feel to it, such as one experiences when an enormous tension has been resolved. 

And so Yoel Ravid began to give in. Since he was capable of observing, he grew fond of observing in silence. With tired but open eyes. Into the depth of the darkness. And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing than this to do. Hoping for a recurrence of one of those rare, unexpected moments when the blackness is momentarily illuminated, and there comes a flicker, a furtive glimmer, which one must not miss, one must not be caught off guard. Because it may signify a presence which makes us ask ourselves what is left. Besides elation and humility.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his prison cell where he was held by the Nazis before being executed for his part in the officer’s plot on Hitler’s life, famously sketched out a more theological vision of faith for modern Christians living in “a world come of age,” a world in which he says “before God and with God we live without God.” In several ways, his thoughts—though he never got to formally expand on them—speak powerfully to contemporary challenges to faith and to the need to embrace uncertainty and absence. “I discovered and I’m still discovering right up to this moment,” Bonhoeffer wrote,


“…that it is only by living completing in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint or a converted sinner or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That I think is faith; that is metanoia [repentance]; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”

 For Bonhoeffer, God’s presence is found not in strength—not in signs and symbols and sound and fury that the adherents to faith-as-certainty look for (and that the disciples of Celestial Dictatorship wish for)—but in weakness. “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross,” he wrote. “He is weak and powerless in the world and that is the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”

G-d, then does not exist in the world to provide Absolute Answers to our uncertainties and ambiguities, but as a as a companion, suffering with us in the absence and randomness and indifference of nature, and inviting us to solidarity with Him and with each other, and with all of suffering creation. In this may be the essential Christian—and Christmas message--Emanuelle, God With Us.

From the jail in Tegel, where Bonhoeffer wrote to his family and friends, he told his confidant Eberhard Bethge early in December 1943 that “a prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”

And Advent is not a bad picture of the life-in-waiting that characterizes the human condition, suspended in a state of uncertainty, of incomplete knowledge, at times painfully aware of the absence of that which we still wait for. So we wait with open eyes in the darkness until, at any moment, the door is opened and a new light is shed—at which time possibly, and possibly well before we die, we will know something else.