Theories in the Dark

“The waiting itself is already the beginning. If one continues to wait, one finds oneself going against a current of fear, the fear that leads back towards desperation and despair. […] Fear of what? Of nothingness, Kierkegaard says.”
“‘Now is my soul troubled’ even Jesus can say, even in the Gospel of John when he is facing death. ‘Now shall the ruler of this world be cast out,’ he says, though, when he goes through fear to courage. One goes through fear to courage, it seems, through desperation and despair to hope, through sorrow to joy…”
- John S. Dunne The Reasons of the Heart GTP 150

I don’t know what to think of this. On one hand, it sounds nice. On the other, so does the thought that kobolds do exist and are in fact hiding my loose socks. I guess the more appropriate question is whether or not it is true, and I just don’t know. It sounds a bit WWJD, a bit check-your-brain-at-the-door and just hope that everything turns out all right, a bit irresponsible. Then again, the author is a professor of theology at Notre Dame.
So maybe the more interesting question (and possibly the only one I am qualified to ask…) is why I am reacting against his ideas. Could it be that they tug at the last kernel of optimism that I have left? And that by uncovering it and subjecting it to scrutiny that I might inadvertently find it to be false, and consequently extinguish the last star in this dark night?
The only credit that I can muster to myself revolves around my tenacity, my dogged insistence that somehow, something good is coming. I have always labeled it faith, always classified it as inexplicable. Perhaps my fear is that if I examine this “faith” I will find not a commendable belief in the providence of the divine, but a childish insistence that, were I to but cross my arms and stamp my feet long enough, the world would acquiesce. Put another way, my fear is that if I agree (and identify) with Dr. Dunne, and through further conversation discredit his theories, that I would find the best part of myself unmasked and discredited as well.
What disenfranchised person does not want to believe that they need but to wait? In the darkness, what man does not hope for the light? How does God change any of this?
Two Possibilities.
First, He doesn’t. Or rather that His presence IS hope, and only through His grace do things ever take a turn for the better. That interests me only enough to voice it, and no more.
Second, though, what if our response to the dark is not to hope for the light, but for God? Faith is not the belief that “God had plans for me and that things will turn out all right,” but that they already have. That I am living God’s plan every day. That my faith is not in the deliverance of the future, but in the providence of the present.
Lord, give me the strength to look into the nothingness and see you. To not spend my time in preparation for the future but in living every day for you. Amen.