So there I was, fresh out of college with my shiny new B.A. in Biblical Studies, thinking I had it all figured out. Man, was I wrong. Instead of clarity, I got thrown into what mystics call “the dark night of the soul.”
This wasn’t just a bad week or a spiritual funk. This was years of questioning everything I thought I knew about God, faith, and myself. It’s funny how education can sometimes lead to more questions than answers.
The catalyst was Philip Yancey’s book “Disappointment with God.” Not your typical progressive read. Yet, the title spoke to me – finally someone acknowledging that sometimes our relationship with God isn’t all sunshine and rainbows! Maybe he could solve my problem with theodicy, so I thought.
The book presents God in the three persons of the Trinity. It was when I got to the section about the Holy Spirit when something just… happened. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like a light switch flipped in my spirit. Later I’d learn terms like “spiritual awakening” or “satori” to describe it, but in that moment, it was just real.
This question kept bubbling up inside me: “If God is in me, why do I need all these rules? Why do I need a building or an organization? If God is in me, isn’t church wherever I am?” It wasn’t rebellion talking – it was something deeper, more authentic.
The God I’d studied and been taught up to this point suddenly became this intimate presence I could feel. Not some distant deity who needed me to jump through institutional hoops, but something both beyond everything and right here inside me. The transcendent became immanent in a very real sense.
Years later, I discovered there’s actually a theological/philosophical term for this experience of God: panentheism. It’s this idea that God is both within everything and also beyond it. Panentheism says “God is in everything, but also more than everything.” That was what I was experiencing.
This was the beginning of what I now call my “collaboration with God.” Sounds fancy, I know, but it’s really just about recognizing that divine presence isn’t something you have to search for – it’s already there, working with you and through you. The Imago Dei had a whole new meaning.
The dark night isn’t a one and done experience – it recurs from time to time. But now there is this light within the darkness. Not from church programs or theological certainty, but from recognizing God is present in my very being, even when everything feels unclear.
And it’s a journey. The questions don’t disappear – they just evolve. There’s something incredibly freeing about a mystical approach to faith. It honors both tradition and personal experience; it values the inner journey as much as the outward expressions.
One way I think about it is sometimes we have to lose our religion to find our faith. And in that finding, we discover that God and ourselves are participants in something much bigger than we ever imagined.