Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again – John 3:7
In Walker Percy’s novel Second Coming the protagonist goes into a cave intending to make it his tomb. He is, however, driven to seek a way of escape from the cave because of a painful toothache. In his search in the dark, he enters a passage that is very confined. He keeps crawling until he falls out into the open world. It’s been a while since I read the book, but, as best I recall, I didn’t catch on right away, whether through Percy’s skill or my own denseness. I have a feeling Nicodemus had a similar experience in his encounter with Jesus. Sometime later he was probably thinking about the whole conversation along with all he knew about the Lord and had a slap-your-head moment. Or, as Rip Taylor used to say, “You’ll think about this later, and you’ll laauugh!”
Evangelicals talk a lot about how easy it is to be born again. And it is. All one has to do is die first. We baptize people in water because it is so much easier than burying them and digging them back up. Life, death, and rebirth are akin to the dialectic thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. To experience any kind of true growth, we have to be hidden away, enter the crypt, and re-emerge.
Because Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is a once-for-all carrying away of sin, I want to think that my own long, dark night of the soul is a once-for-all experience from which I should emerge into eternal sunlight and joy. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis mentions the nature of man as being subject to a sort of sine wave shaped “law of undulation”. We gain ground; we lose a little; we gain a little more. It is enough to cause me to think that perhaps it’s all right if I have to keep entering the dark and coming out the other side.
In fact I think we may precipitate a cycle by our decisions to seek God. I believe beyond any question that God hears and answers our prayers. He gives us that which we seek, though it is common – in my case anyway – not to recognize the answer when it arrives. (See JWM’s WFB putting together old bikes) In many cases, an answer to prayer involves a trial or a crisis of opposition that seems to be not only blocking our deliverance but pushing us further away. I am taken aback and discouraged, but I should not be. The way up is down. The road to the light leads through darkness.
Our prayers try us, and the word of the Lord that comes to us as a result will test us, just as the word of his vision tried Joseph (Psalm 105:16-22) before leading to his deliverance and that of his people. Joseph went into the pit, from the pit to the chains of slavery, from slavery to the dungeon, from the dungeon to the throne. The thing I need to learn is, first, not to allow trials to convince me that God does not know what He is doing. Second, the valley of the shadow of death is a very real, very dark place through which my path to enlightenment leads, and I may be there more than once. Third, when in the valley of the shadow of death or the tomb or the pit or the cave, I will not get out if I sit down. I must keep going. Finally, it will not do me any good to take the back track. I cannot find my way out by going back the way I came. I must leave a “different way”.
