Faithbook: Dark Ages of the Soul - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

Dark Ages of the Soul

This week, On Faith asks its panelists: How do you keep your faith during times of war?

Fr. Reese insists that there are no atheists in foxholes, but Chaplain Major John Morris, on Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith, wholeheartedly disagreed.

Maj. Morris: There are atheists in foxholes. . . . What I saw in my combat experience — and I’ve seen through my 22 years — is on the battlefield, using crude numbers, a third of the soldiers were men and women of faith, growing in their faith or coming to a new understanding of their faith. A third of the soldiers were indifferent or fatalistic. And that's, that religion on the battlefield bears a lot of looking at. The other third were either indifferent or jettisoning their faith . . . So you meet a real mix, just like you do on any street in America. The American military's no different. Everything from the atheist to the devout Orthodox Jew to the Wiccan to the Pagan to everything in between. It's all there.

Except the Wiccans were not entitled to their First Amendment rights until four weeks ago.

But I digress. . .

Through my own painful experience, I’ve learned that faith must be decimated before it can be legitimate. 9/11 devastated the religion of my childhood: I could not make sense of an omnipotent, intervening God who allowed the terrorist attacks as part of “God’s plan.” My notions of God’s intent, power and grace were destroyed.

I experienced a five-year Dark Night of the Soul.

Through that time, I despised my confusion and desolation. At certain periods, I was fundamentally cynical. At others, I defended the religious worldview into which I had been inculcated. I dug my spiritual (J. Crew) heels in, and resisted the uninvited lurch towards unknowing.

Other deaths and tragedies close to me in the last year, and a passionate embrace of religious studies, threw me over the dogmatic edge. As I learned from Charles Winquist in his Desiring Theology which I studied in my Senior Year Religious Pluralism Seminar, my experience of limitation, of a loss of control, is primal experience of “The Other.” If I can find God, I must first do it by humbling myself.

The more I know, the less I know. That is all I know.

And for me, that is the way, the truth, the life.

How do I keep my faith in times of war, of challenge, of profound sadness and overwhelming chaos?

By first losing it.

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Dark Ages of the Soul

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