I'm still reading L'Engle, this time The Irrational Season, the third of her Crosswicks journals. This volume is more concerned with theology than the previous two had been.

I'm four chapters in, and already three short passages have lodged in my mind. The first is, But if I cannot see God's love here on the Upper West Side of New York where we seem to have done everything possible to destroy the beauty of creation, it is going to do me very little good to rejoice in beauty in the uncluttered world of the country.

Since I myself have chosen "the uncluttered world of the country," I felt a flash of recognition. It's easy to see creation as holy on a day like today, when the vista of our valley spreads out green and beautiful around me; when the season's first pint of fragrant strawberries, fresh from local fields, has made the journey to my kitchen counter; when our red fox darts across the driveway, crossing my path down to the dirt road and the beaver pond. I have a harder time maintaining consciousness of God in cities where trees are hemmed in with asphalt, where people don't look each other in the eye...and an even harder time when I look at the wider world and consider slow-motion genocide in Sudan, slag heaps, slums.

My tradition and my personal theology both tell me that God is present even in the terrible things that we do to one another; God is present even in despair (though it may be the definition of despair that one becomes unable to perceive that Presence). But this is hard for me to grapple with...and leads to the second L'Engle quote I've already copied out: The only God who seems to me worth believing in is impossible for mortal man to understand....[A] comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

I'm with L'Engle on this one (and with Maimonides, for that matter.) Anthropomorphic language is easy, but incorrect; we see God in whatever garments we drape Mystery in, but we can't see what's beyond the cloak. God is incomprehensible, and it occurs to me that so is faith. Faith can't happen intellectually; it's not something one can understand. It doesn't make much sense to look at the broken world and persist in believing in God, and yet.... Maybe that's part of what we're here for: the leap of faith, and the leap of becoming active participants in creation. Faith is a conscious choice; healing the world is a conscious choice; and both derive meaning from the possibility of their opposites.

The third L'Engle quote I've copied comes from a chapter about marriage. She's referring to the periodic conflicts that she and her husband have endured, but I read it as an excellent message about dark times in general: I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. To me, there's something oddly hopeful about that sentiment. There will always be a next time when God seems absent...but sunrise is also always already on the way.