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But there's suffering, too. In your book, tucked away between talking about gratefulness and beholding God, you talk very personally about how, if we're truly going to learn to trust God, we can't avoid the personal suffering.

When I was outside an alcohol and drug rehab center in New Orleans, and I was clutching a pint of Taaka vodka, what I did not want was the lifesaving treatment of detox in a 28-day program.

I kept on drinking, a drunken child crying out, "Jesus, where are you?" How do we experience trust in the midst of pain, suffering, heartache, and throbbing despair? I mean, is it possible to endure and eventually move beyond the bleak and melancholy landscape of evil and destruction, back to the experience of God as unconditional love? That's the problem I ask Christians. Do you trust that God loves you? Everybody says, oh yes, I've known that for a long time. Then just watch the way they live. There's so much fear, so much anxiety, and so much self-hatred. The best definition of faith I ever heard was Paul Tillich when he said, "Faith is the courage to accept acceptance."

Meaning? Faith is a code to accept that Jesus knows my whole life story, every skeleton in my closet, every moment of sin, shame, dishonesty, degradedness darkening my past. Right now he knows my shallow faith, my feeble prayer life, my inconsistent discipleship, and he comes beside me and he says, I dare you to trust. I dare you to trust that I love you, just as you are and not as you should be, because you're never going to be as you should be.

Why are we afraid that God won't love us as we are?

My sense is this, that if I let the love of God run wild in my life, what is he going to demand of me? Is he going to say I've got to spend 10 years in Calcutta with Mother Teresa's missionaries? Is he going to give me cancer? Is he going to tell me I've got to leave my spouse and just go live in a cave for him alone? All these crazy fears have nothing to do with the real God who takes delight in his people.

To me, it's more important to be loved than to love. When I have not had the experience of being loved by God, just as I am and not as I should be, then loving others becomes a duty, a responsibility, a chore. But if I let myself be loved as I am, with the love of God poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit, then I can reach out to others in a more effortless way.

And the trust born of this love is ruthless, you say.

That sounds like a funny thing: ruthless trust. The dictionary defines ruthless as "without pity." In the context I'm using it, it's without self-pity. Self-pity is the first normal unavoidable reaction. I think we just waste our time trying to suppress it. But there comes a time when it threatens to become malignant. It can seduce us into self-destructive patterns like withdrawal, isolation, drinking, drugs, and so forth. And then we simply beg God for the grace to set a time limit on our self-pity.

The poet said that the last illusion we must let go of is the desire to feel loved. There's a monk up in the Genesee Abbey. He's been there 30 years. And a visitor asked him, "Do you still feel as close to God as you did when you went in 30 years ago?" And the monk's glorious answer was, "No, but now it doesn't matter." He was so freed from the need to feel loved that he could indiscriminately accept consolation or desolation, God's presence or God's absence, as one and the same thing. With the rise and fall of my fragile feelings, thank God that the presence of God within me doesn't depend on my fickle feelings, or I'd be in deep caca.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46