The Gift of Uncertainty

SCRIPTURE TEXT:  1 Corinthians 13:11-12

Rev. Monte Marshall 

Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and moral philosopher in the Late Middle Ages.  In his most famous work, The Divine Comedy, he wrote: “In the middle of the road of life I awoke in a Dark Wood where the true way was wholly lost.”1 

Pastor Eric Elnes, in his book Gifts of the Dark Wood, notes that for Dante, “the Dark Wood is a place of confusion, emptiness and stumbling that is entered because of our sin and is inhabited by strange and terrifying denizens…. According to Dante, [the Dark Wood] marks the entrance to the Inferno and everlasting torment.”2  It’s a place so horrific that we don’t want to step into it if we don’t have to.  

Many Christians in Dante’s day and in our own have interpreted the Dark Wood in just this way.  But not everyone.  For example, many mystics in the Christian tradition have taken a different view.  To be sure, these mystics have acknowledged the Dark Wood as a place of struggle, and sin may be one of the many reasons we find ourselves there, but the Dark Wood is not a place of punishment for sin.  Instead, the mystics have interpreted the Dark Wood as a place “in which revelation takes place.”3  St. John of the Cross named his experience of the Dark Wood, “the dark night of the soul.”  “Dionysus the Areopagite called it the cloud of unknowing.”   

Elnes explains that for these and other mystics, “the Dark Wood is a place where one receives strange and wondrous gifts whose value vastly exceeds whatever hardships are encountered there.  The Dark Wood is where [we] meet God” and the place where we discover who we are and what our lives are about, “flaws and all.”4 

Elnes notes that “in the Dark Wood [we] bring all [our] shortcomings with [us], not in order to purge them or be judged by them, but to embrace them in such a way that [our] struggles contribute meaningfully to the central conversation God is inviting [us] to have with life.”5 

So what is the experience of the Dark Wood like?  Elnes cites several examples: “Some people find themselves in the Dark Wood when they wake up one day and realize that the career that has provided a healthy paycheck for years has also been sucking the life out of them.  Others find themselves there when tragedy strikes, or a marriage fails, or a serious health threat arises, shaking their confidence in God’s goodness or God’s very existence.  Some enter the Dark Wood when their beliefs—or doubts—set them at odds with their friends or faith community.  They can no longer bring themselves to pray the prayers or recite the creeds because their internal dissonance meter has gone off the charts.  For these or other reasons they grow weary of juggling all the masks they wear to project a certain image to the world that has little to do with who they really are.  For still others, sheer exhaustion places them in the Dark Wood.  They wake up one day facing too many commitments made to too many people, feeling trapped in a tightly woven web of obligation and guilt.”6 

From the mystic’s point of view, experiences of the Dark Wood like these are not devoid of value or meaning.  On the contrary, struggles like these place us “in the best possible position to experience profound awakening and insight”7 about who we are and what we are doing here.   

These are the gifts of the Dark Wood.  And during this season of Lent, we’ll be entering the Dark Wood to seek these gifts.  On this particular Sunday, we seek the gift of uncertainty. 

Author Brian McLaren writes that “Certainty is overrated.”  Elnes explains: “Too much certainty removes the adventure from life and sucks the joy out of relationships.  When marriage becomes predictable,” for example, “love wanes.  Couples seek counseling or even get divorced.  The strongest relationships are those where each partner continues to experience mystery and new awareness concerning the other.”  A friend of Eric Elnes’ once told him: “’I’ve been married to twenty-nine different women in thirty years.  Coincidentally, each of them happened to be name Marianna.’”8 

In this morning’s scripture reading, Paul suggests that growth involves moving beyond the certainty of childhood and into an adult faith comfortable with mystery: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”   

Elnes notes that “children do enjoy a degree of uncertainty as long as the outcome doesn’t really matter.  They love to turn the crank of a jack-in-the-box and be surprised when jack jumps out.  But once you turn to more serious matters—like replacing their usual blue sippy cup with a green one—all hell breaks loose!  Children love certainty and crave…dependability.”9 

In Paul’s view, growing up into adulthood means learning to live with uncertainty, but with the hope of greater clarity yet to come in the fullness of time: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  

Now the Greek word translated as “dimly” in this text, is the source of our English word enigma.  Elnes remarks that “Enigma means ‘mystery.’  Enigma is ‘puzzling, a riddle, ambiguous, difficult to understand or interpret.’  What Paul is saying,” according to Elnes, “is that a mature faith is one that embraces life as a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved—that accepts uncertainty as a gift, not a curse.”10 

And what is a mature faith, but a deep and profound trust?  John Ortberg writes: “We all think we want certainty.  But we don’t.  What we really want is trust, wisely placed.  Trust is better than certainty because it honors the freedom of persons and makes possible growth and intimacy that certainty alone could never produce.”  Elnes notes that “It is trust developed in the caldron of uncertainty that…gives us the confidence to allow the sweet-spot moments of our lives to lead us more deeply into the Dark Wood and find our place in this world.” 11 

Speaking personally, I have been to the Dark Wood.  My father died of liver cancer on April 21, 1995.  We had known for over a year that his condition was terminal.  It was the prospect of my father’s death that drew me into the Dark Wood where I struggled with the fact of my dad’s dying—and with the reality of my own mortality.  For the first time in my 42 years of life, I confronted the profound mystery of death and the utter uncertainty of what my life would be like without my dad. 

On this last point, it was early-on in the process of my dad’s dying that the thought struck me like a thunderbolt:  I knew what life was like with my wife and our two sons, but I had no idea what life would be like without my dad.  I did sense that I would have to grow up.  I would no longer be my dad’s little boy.  I would have to redefine my place in the world.  And frankly, I wasn’t sure that I was ready to make the transition.