Dealing with Disillusionment

Disillusionment. It can be a soul shattering experience or a faith building moment. Disillusionment challenges all the assumptions I have held dear and leaves me empty, or it forces me to open other doors seeking greater insight and understanding. That is because, no matter how you look at it, disillusionment breaks the mold of my common belief. I must forgo a faith that has not held up or seek a deeper understanding of it.

I find such times as these are often the most fruitful times of my life, though often only in retrospect. When I am in the midst of crisis, I need to remember that such life-altering experiences do not have to defeat me. I can take these times and use them for cleansing my "easy" type of faith, the faith where prayers are answered and God seems kind and gentle. Disillusionment challenges that concept. God seems cruel or indifferent, deaf and uncaring. God does not answer my prayers. In these instances, I need a new way to understand.
That is because faith is not an insurance against tragedy. Faith is, rather, the foundation for recovery.

A prayer that helped me through such times came from psalm 25:5:  Make me walk in your truth and teach me: for you are God my savior.  It replaced the one I so glibly recited years before from psalm 27:1: The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear?

Disillusionment challenges my shallow belief. If I move forward, it can take me from where I think I am steadfast and unmovable, to where I realize how fragile I really am. I believe this is the true gem of such times, a time to get to know my real self.

Instead of blaming God for my vulnerabilities, I need to accept them. And with deep faith I will come to realize, I do have the power to make the most of them.

Not waiting for tragedy to strike

I love to walk early in the morning, especially when the moon is out, and everything has an eerie glow, with moon shadows and moon light. I remember one such walk last summer, when I was working at the monastery, and thoughts were about recent events in the lack of vocations. My understanding is, vocations are always slow for dedicated religious life, and that the only times monasteries were rushed with applicants were after some drastic war, when death and suffering were very real in the minds of the young. Death and intense suffering do have a way of making us look for something deeper, more lasting, more eternal.

And that makes me wonder, why do we have to face death and suffering before we make God a serious part of our daily lives? For a death sentence strikes fear to those who know little of the Divine Being. And learning about God in the here and now can bring so much peace and joy.

My thoughts go to a deathbed I witnessed while I lived in the monastery, where the rather young sister was dying of cancer. Death was not fearful for her. She greeted it with a joy so profound and a peace so deep it is hard to describe. This attitude affected me very much, as I was one of her caregivers, and saw her suffering, her quick decline, and her willingness to accept it all. She had made God her friend, and so she could welcome death because she believed she was going to someone she knew, someone she had thought about often.

It demonstrates just how powerful friendship with the Divine can be, and why we should not wait for suffering or death to force the issue.

Which brings me back to some of my thoughts of moonlight in early morning darkness. I think it resembles living without an awareness of spiritual things. We can see, but in a dim way. Faith has always been called a light, a light so steady that no suffering or death can dim it. More importantly, there is so much joy to be had in building a spiritual relationship with the Divine it is a pity so few seek to develop one while life is going well.

Let's not wait for death to force spirituality upon us. Let us develop a relationship now, in the fullness of health.  Divinity is waiting for us.