Soul Keeping

by John Ortberg

  That same year, in the space of a few days, Al’s skin turned the color of a ripe banana. It was cancer — a very dire kind. He lived through a year and a half of physical pain and bodily humiliation. But his heart opened up to God. We began to pray and read the Bible together. In his last conversation with Nancy, he told her how much he loved her. He died the day after Valentine’s Day, the day before his wedding anniversary, after a year of more peace than he had ever known. The darkest year of his life became, somehow, the year of light.

  During the early days of our marriage, I also came to know a friend, Gary Moon. I met Gary, a red-haired Georgia boy with a deep Southern drawl, when we both entered a clinical psychology program in California. We ended up in a supervisory group together. I don’t remember any supervision at all, but I do remember lying on the ground and laughing at Gary’s stories.

  Gary was from a small sect called the Pentecostal Holiness Church that was incapable of being uninteresting. His Uncle Otis was a faith healer with a knack for memorable lines. He once asked a demon-possessed man to reveal his identity. “Liar,” the demon responded. Uncle Otis immediately asked, “Are you telling me the truth, lying demon?” thus effectively putting the minion of darkness into an inescapable double-bind. Uncle Otis also prayed over a man who told him that he suffered from constipation: “Lord, heal this man immediately!” — a prayer that went mercifully unanswered. These were the stories that Gary would tell during our months of clinical work together.

  For many years after we graduated, Gary and I were in only sporadic contact, seeing each other periodically at psychology conventions. He had returned to Georgia while I stayed in California. In time, just as both of us had been drawn to the same school to study theology and psychology, we were both drawn to the work of Dallas Willard. Gary edited a journal on Dallas’s writings and asked me to contribute a paper to the journal.

  Eventually a college in Santa Barbara, California, called Westmont formed the Dallas Willard Center for Spiritual Formation. Gary and his wife, Regina, moved so Gary could serve as executive director; I became a member of the board.

  One August afternoon in 2012, as I was working on this book, I joined Gary for lunch. “How’s Dallas?” I asked. Dallas had been experiencing some health difficulties over the summer; I had talked with him a few days earlier and knew that Gary had just come back from visiting him and Jane.

  “How good are you at compartmentalizing?” Gary asked. “I’d rather not talk about it on a golf course.” I died a little inside.

  We waited until dinner, sitting on a deck watching the sun go down beyond the Channel Islands, framed by the beauty of Santa Barbara’s harbor and palm-lined beachfront.

  “It’s cancer,” Gary said. It was the same kind of cancer that my wife’s father had died from twenty-three years earlier.

  WHEN GOD SEEMS SILENT

  Because the soul is the deepest expression of the person, the soul is the place of greatest pain. We do not speak of the dark night of the mind, or the will, or even the spirit. Only the soul. The dark night of the soul.

  The phrase comes from a brilliant Carmelite monk named John who lived in Spain in the sixteenth century. He devoted his life to reforming the church, but his attempts were heavily criticized, and he ended up in prison. It was there in confinement, with his dreams lost, that he wrote his most famous work: The Dark Night of the Soul. It is an account of how God works to change us not just through joy and light, but through confusion, through disappointment, through loss. Because of his commitment in the midst of suffering, he became known as “St. John of the Cross.”

  The dark night of the soul, as he described it, is not simply the experience of suffering. It is suffering in what feels like the silence of God.

  This saint who bore the name of the cross of Jesus said that in the early days of spiritual life, the soul often finds delight in devotional activities: We love to read the Bible, we hunger for worship, we long to pray. We may think this is a sign of our maturity; it is really more a kind of honeymoon phase.

  “But there will come a time when God will bid them to grow deeper. He will remove the previous consolation of the soul in order to teach it virtue. . . .” In the dark night, my prayers feel like they reach no higher than the ceiling. (Although, Dallas often said, if we truly understand how radically present God is in our world, reaching the ceiling is more than high enough.) In the dark night, the Bible I read turns to ashes. In the dark night, words and books and songs that once spoke to my soul now leave me cold.

  It is important to understand that the dark night, as John writes about it, is not the soul’s fault. Of course, it’s possible for me to grow cold toward God because I cling to sin, or prefer an idol, or simply become lazy. These are all real occurrences that require wise response. But they are not the dark night. The dark night is God-initiated.

  There’s an old illustration that was used to teach uninterrupted intimacy with God as the norm for successful spiritual life. It never failed to add guilt to spiritual dryness. It is a picture of intimacy with God that’s as old as bench seats in the front of cars. A husband and wife are driving together. She says to him: “When we were dating, we used to sit next to each other while we drove; you would have your arm around me, I would lay my head on your shoulder, and I felt so loved. Now look at the distance between us.” And the husband replies: “Who moved?”

  In the dark night of the soul, it is God who moved.

  God may still be in the car. But he’s scrunched up small and pressing hard against the passenger door. I stretch my arm but I can’t reach him or feel him or touch him. My soul has not changed seats. God moved.

  WAITING IN THE DARK

  The practices that once fed my soul feed it no more. John of the Cross, writing from his prison cell, says in the dark night the soul is pained but not hopeless. “God’s love is not content to leave us in our weakness, and for this reason he takes us into a dark night. He weans us from all of the pleasures by giving us dry times and inward darkness. . . . No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.” We have a hard time with the dark night. Our churches are practical places, and we generally tell people the answer to any spiritual problem is more: more prayer, more serving, more giving, more trying.

  But John says just the opposite. When the soul begins to enjoy the benefits of the spiritual life and then has them taken away, it becomes embittered and angry. There are some who become angry at themselves at this point, thinking that their loss of joy is a result of something they have done or have neglected to do. They will fuss and fret and do all they can to recover this consolation. They will strive to become saints in a day. They will make all kinds of resolutions to be more spiritual, but the greater the resolution, the greater the fall.

  Their problem is that they lack the patience that waits for whatever God would give them and when God chooses to give. They must learn spiritual meekness, which will come about in the dark night.

  What do we do in the dark night?

  We do nothing. We wait. We remember that we are not God. We hold on. We ask for help. We do less. We resign from things, we rest more, we stop going to church, we ask somebody else to pray because we can’t. We let go of our need to hurry through it.

  You can’t run in the dark.

  We love psalms about restoring our souls. They are sometimes called psalms of orientation — psalms that help us direct our lives to God. But there are other psalms. After we learned of Dallas’s diagnosis, my wife delivered a message based on what Walter Brueggemann calls “psalms of disorientation.” These are the psalms where the soul is disoriented; God is absent; darkness is winning. “Break the teeth in their mouths, O God. . . . Let them vanish like water that flows away . . . like a slug that melts away as it moves along, like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.” That’s one that doesn’t get used at a lot of prayer breakfasts. Eugene Peterson once wrote that before we can love our ene
mies, we have to pray our hatred. In these psalms — which are more frequent than the psalms of orientation — Israel vented and boiled over at God, apparently believing he was secure enough to be able to take it.

  Nancy talked about an unmarried friend who once punctured the polite piety of a small group Bible study that was having an abstract discussion about “where is God when it hurts?” With the honesty rarely seen in Bible study groups, she declared, “If Jesus thinks that three hours on a cross makes up for forty-two years of singleness, I think that’s crazy.”

  Cool!

  Nancy waited for the group to get swallowed up in a sinkhole. Eventually someone chirped in with a Christian cliché, and the moment passed. But there was more honest faith in that one real comment than all the safe platitudes that came before and after it.

  In my own darkest time some years ago, my greatest disappointment was deep and unfixable. I questioned my calling. I didn’t think about suicide, but I definitely thought that if my life were over, I’d be grateful for the end of pain. I would talk to a few close friends, and they would generally give sympathy and support, for which I was grateful.

  But then I did what I have so often done when I cannot think or pray or reason my way out of something. I called Dallas. I walked him through the circumstances and the heartbreak and the pain, eager for his answer.

  Long pause.

  “This will be a test of your joyful confidence in God.”

  Silence.

  I did not miss the challenge in this sentence, all the more goading for its gentle phrasing. Not just my confidence — my joyful confidence. Human beings around the globe had been suffering a year ago, and I was capable of joy then. Why should I consider my own suffering grounds for a crisis of confidence in God when I don’t react the same way to others?

  If there is a God who is worthy to be the Father of Jesus, I can trust giving this situation as well as my own feelings joyfully into his hands. If there is not, I have infinitely bigger problems than a merely human circumstance. Either way it is true: this will be a test of my joyful confidence in God.

  AWED BY THE SLOWNESS OF GOD

  Modern churches with linear models of spiritual growth and large-scale models for devotional life rarely speak of or help people with the dark night. We are uncomfortable with it because we want to do something — because we sell formulas and steps and programs, and the dark night of the soul is not our program. The dark night is for souls that learn to wait.

  After Gary told me about Dallas’s diagnosis that August, I drove back to Box Canyon to talk and pray with Dallas and Jane. They began to receive notes and prayers from people all around the world. In particular, they began to hear from people who also journey in the night.

  Joni Eareckson Tada, who has spent her adult life paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and more recently has written of her own struggle with cancer, heard about Dallas and sent to him and Jane these words from a nineteenth-century writer named Frederick Faber:

  In the spiritual life God chooses to try our patience first of all by His slowness. He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been for eternity. . . . There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God. Let it overshadow our souls, but let it not disquiet them. We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait. He does not go their road. When He comes, go with Him, but go slowly, fall a little behind; when he quickens His pace, be sure of it, before you quicken yours. But when He slackens, slacken at once: and do not be slow only, but silent, very silent, for He is God.

  When I read that, I was reminded of Dallas’s own words to me: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

  Dallas and Jane showed me a little book they got from Dieter Zander, A Stroke of Grace. Dieter and I had worked together in Chicago at Willow Creek Community Church; he was an artist, musician, and teacher. Willow Creek was at the time perhaps the highest-profile church in the country, and Dieter was its highest-profile worship leader. He led worship with so much vigor that at times he (literally) left blood on the keyboard from cracked fingernails. He led with such energy that we actually had to stop doing certain songs because people in the balconies jumped around too much and the facilities engineers were afraid the whole thing would come down — a kind of joy-driven variation of Samson and the Philistines.

  Dieter loved the writings of Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born Catholic priest and prolific author. I remember having a long discussion with him about Nouwen’s reflections on a verse in the gospel of John. Jesus told Peter that as a young man, Peter had gone where he wanted, but when he was old, Peter would be dressed by other hands and led to where he did not want to go. We were young men then; the vulnerability of aging was poignant to us.

  One night when Dieter was in his late forties, he began to shake violently. He suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of his brain. When he awoke six days later, he was no longer able to communicate as he had; he had to learn to say his wife’s name, to say his sons’ names. He could no longer use his right hand and therefore he could no longer lead worship. The music and words that flowed out of him were now mostly trapped in his brain.

  He used to work on a stage, before thousands of people who applauded his every move. Now he works in a windowless room in the back of a Trader Joe’s grocery store. He breaks down boxes. When fruit is bruised, if a pear falls on the floor — when any product is no longer regarded as perfect, it is brought to Dieter. From him it will go to feed the hungry, who do not care if their apple is lopsided.

  Dieter once wrote in a letter:

  It is good that I work there. I am like that fruit. I am imperfect. Inside I am the same person, the same sense of humor, the same thoughts. But my words betray me. What should take three minutes to say is an hour of frustration. People lose patience with me. Aphasia means aloneness. But God hears me. My world is small, and quiet, and slow and simple. No stage. No performance. More real. Good.

  A year or so after Dieter’s stroke, he and his wife, Val, visited Nancy and me. He used a small whiteboard to help him communicate. Toward the end of our time together, he began to write a Bible verse. I knew which one it would be even before he scribbled it on the board: John 21:18: “When you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Then below that verse, Dieter wrote: “Good.”

  “Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

  ‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’ ”

  KEEP ETERNITY BEFORE THE CHILDREN

  Dallas had to go through an operation called the “Whipple procedure,” a brutal invasion of the body that my wife (who was a nurse, and who watched her dad go through this) always describes inelegantly as having the doctor gut you like a fish. It’s not a risk-free operation. When we gathered to pray for him, Dallas said before going through it, “Whatever happens will be wonderful.”

  Watching Dallas walk this path was like watching a scout, who has been doing advance work anyway, begin to walk into a country where we will all one day arrive. He said once, “I think that, when I die, it may take some time before I know it.”

  Huh?

  A person, Dallas said, is essentially a collection of conscious experiences. Far more than just bodies or just appetites, we are our experiences. That’s why we treasure the good ones so — a beautiful sunset, a favorite scene in a movie, a first kiss, a dramatic victory.

  This conscious experience of life, Dallas said, will go right on uninterrupted by death. Jesus put it so strikingly: “The one who trusts in me will never taste death.” What does it mean to never taste death? Why did he say it like that?

  My friend Gary said that the phrase that came to his mind, watching Dallas walk in the valley of the shadow of death, was “Game on.�
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  The shadow had found a worthy adversary.

  CHAPTER 17

  MORNING

  We have this hope as an anchor of the soul, firm and secure.

  HEBREWS 6:19

  The soul is a ship that needs an anchor.

  I am sitting once more in the living room in Box Canyon, the one I had met Dallas in decades earlier. Not much has changed in the room. The furniture is the same. The air conditioner roars; Jane says they probably should get a new one but the old one keeps working. I look at Dallas — now my hair is grayer than his was when we first met. My children are grown. I have been able to write books and speak and do many things that I would have been glad to know about when I was in this room the first time. And I have failed and been disappointed in ways that would have seemed unbearable then.

  He is wearing an old bathrobe. When we were cleaning out the garage, he found a few old Bibles from many decades ago. They are falling apart from age and use, underlined and scribbled in, and he greets them as if he is visiting treasured companions after a long absence. We found a scythe in the garage that Dallas used to clear weeds when he was a young boy in Missouri; his father used it before him and his father’s father before that; it is his heirloom.

  I marvel at his peace.

  WHAT REALLY MATTERS

  A few of us gather around him to pray. Dallas begins to sing, still leading worship as he did when he was a preacher boy in his teens, and we join in. What matters is the work, Dallas tells us. What matters is the work of helping people know that God is alive and present and loves them; that this reality that Jesus called the kingdom is among us and available; and that life is precious, yet is wasted with terrible ease. I think, as I watch his emaciated body and hear his vision, of how devotion to movements must be formed in times like these around one who can inspire so.