I am quite familiar with this. The enthusiasms of the faith have long vanished, except for the joy of harmony in the music and being able to sing with the saints of God, plus an occasional intellectual insight that I might read or hear. Very occasionally, God will tweak me with a smiling reminder that he sees me and hears me, and delights in giving me different rescues than the ones I asked for.
As Screwtape says to his nephew, a junior demon, "Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys." I think of Frodo and Sam in Mordor whenever I read that passage, and those scenes had much to do with my conversion in 1975.
Or in the same book "Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." This is an idea that is genuinely frightening to an old man who wonders if his "spiritual maturity" is actually only resignation and false contentment. Getting to the True Self may require a consuming fire. You have heard it said that nothing is inevitable but death and taxes, but there is at least one thing more that is not only inevitable but inexorable, and that is the love of God. Unfortunately (though we hope and prayer ultimately fortunately), the inexorable love of God may be harder to bear in this life than death and taxes together.
Perhaps it is "resignation and false contentment", and a simulacrum of the real thing. Or perhaps it is a divine "splint" for your life. Or perhaps it is a gift.
ReplyDeleteDr. Heidegger's Experiment would be an interesting one. I think the results wouldn't be quite as the story suggests--we sometimes come up with work-arounds and ways to avoid/mitigate temptations, and those might persist.