I came up charismatic. No doubt about it.
My early twenties were filled with visions, dreams, healings and beautiful experiences of God in sung worship. I stayed home on weekends and up at nights listening to Jason Upton records and weeping on the floor for ‘more of God’. It was a special time and I look back on it with such a sweetness.
I learned so much of my early theology from the Pentecostal communities I was surrounded by back then. I went to large power-evangelist meetings and read books about Pentecostal hero’s like Smith Wigglesworth and John G Lake.
The problem was, as it turned out, I was neither of them.
My powerful early experiences in the realm of the felt and miraculous became a slow decline into what felt like cosmic orphanry. Anxiety and loneliness ensued as I tried to make sense of God’s sudden evaporation. There was stuff that was going on, for sure, it wasn’t all spiritual. But a lot of it was.
It appeared that after those initial months and years of God’s breaking-through grace when I was younger, he seemed to ease off. Not for my friends though, they went from strength to strength seeing all kinds of miracles and having experiences of God. I was praying, seeking, aching with all my being, but God alluded me.
I felt a little like Job but without the warts. This was a growing inner poverty. A loss of a particular God space without any evidence of wrongdoing on my part.
Why were they getting ‘the results’ without changing anything, and I wasn’t? It didn’t make any sense to me.
My friends thought I was becoming cynical or faithless for doubting the charismatic theology that said all people should be healed all the time, that salvation was a promise of unrestrained charismatic experiences in prayer, and that miraculous demonstrations of power were the norm for the NT Christian. I wasn’t cynical, I was just trying to make sense of it all.
There was absolutely no theology, they believed, for my felt distance from God. For my battle with depression. For the kind of relationship and struggle I was entering with God. I was to blame, apparently, for all of that.
I simply couldn’t keep up, I was told. I lacked faith. I was backsliding.
But that wasn’t true. Something else was happening. Deeper places were being reached.
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As I’ve grown older and read beyond the last century and a half - beyond the relative historical infancy of Pentecostalism - I’ve actually come to cherish those years, because I see now that what I was experiencing was precisely more of God.
See, from as early as the second century, Christians (as early as Origen in 185 - 253 on) started to see a pattern - in life and in scripture - in the way the Spirit invites us into deeper places in Christ. The charismatic world I was engulfed in tried to teach me that through faith, I could fight and overcome any season of drought like that. It presumed that the gift of the Spirit, once given, flows like a flood as long as an individual can continue to seek, ask and act on it. If it doesn’t, then the individual is to blame.
But the Church Fathers and Mothers saw that there were far more layers than that to the way God moves in our lives. And they saw that an over dependance on the gifts of the Spirit, and even experiences of God, actually serve to shallow our love for Him, not deepen it.
In order that we may have more of God, and not simply love him for the things God gives us, he comes to lovingly and gracefully withhold them for a season before giving them back to us renewed.
The language the ancients gave to this process, and what some call ‘the mystic way’ was that of illumination, purgation, and union. St John of The Cross famously coined a particular kind of purgation the Dark Night of The Soul which we’ll cover later, but where that is a more rare and distinct season of our spiritual progress, the process of illumination, purgation and union is for more regular and cyclical in the believers life.
The journey begins with illumination. Here, the believer comes to an awareness of their need for God and of their own sin. It often comes with experiences of the wonder of God. It’s a powerful moment of God’s reality breaking through and for a season everything is light and full of grace.
Illumination may be as simple as accepting and believing God, or an unusual sense of warm love within us, right through to charismatic experiences like visions or heavenly encounters. Prayer flows powerfully, the gifts manifest frequently, and God’s grace feels like a playground in the world of our ordinary lives.
The problem is, if we stay there too long we can begin to assume that God is a good feeling, a miraculous moment, or that he’s there to make us happy, not mature. So he sweeps in to save us from the shallows of such immaturity. After the romance of first love comes the reality of learning to live the Christ Way.
Here, enters purgation.
Purgation speaks for itself really, it’s God’s purging us of our particular immaturities. He may purge us from our dependance of financial security, on public approval or on the frequent use of our gifts. He may purge us from easy prayer, from answered prayer, or even from the sense of his presence. Because there, when things are hard, is where we learn to love God not for what makes sense, but for what doesn’t make sense. There, we’re abandoned to believe either in his goodness or not, without our usual modes of qualification to do so.
Suddenly, the old methods to get what we want just don’t work anymore. That’s not God’s abandonment or condemnation, it’s his invitation to a new transformative experience of him.
And if we say yes to it, if we can overcome the offence of it all and love God regardless, we’ll discover something we could never have dreamed of in the ankle deep waters of our spiritually adolescent experiences - union with God.
Union is the place of oneness with God, and in the ‘three step journey’ it’s what we mean when we say salvation. Union is the sense of total divine withness. It’s a life rooted in God’s kind of love, not ours. Where whatever may come, our love for Him is constant because we’ve discovered through our purgation seasons that God’s love is constant for us. In union, our love is like God’s love and we are filled to the brim with self-sacrificing other-love. To the monastics, one spends their entire life reaching this kind of perfection (or completion) in love (the Orthodox call this Theosis, we’ll get to that in another post too). Ultimately, perfection is a gift of God that continues through to the resurrection and beyond.
We see this threefold spiritual process in the scriptures as repentance (illumination), life in the Spirit (purgation) and perfection in love (union).
What’s important in this way, is that there is a large ark of it in our lives, for sure, but it’s also a process that happens in concentric circles throughout it. We go through illumination, purgation and union on a million little cycles as well as a few big ones. Sometimes in different ways during different places of our lives at the same time.
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The beauty this offers my young charismatic self going through the pain of a long purgation in my 20’s after a profound introduction to God’s presence, is that it provides space for seasons of God’s felt-absence. More recently, it’s given me incredible strength in these last seven years of chronic illness when the day’s have been eventless and long and God at times has remained quiet. It gives those experiences meaning by contextualising them as training for the goal of love.
It gives God the power to move how he desires and it helps us to see that our droughts aren’t an absence of God’s love toward me, they’re a deepening of it. Even when we can’t feel it, God is pouring out his love on us.
It makes God, God.
He’s not a formula we can conjure up through charismatic legalisms or back into a corner through theological assertions. He’s a Person who wants to be known as more than a ‘power source’ or giver of good feelings. He’s a Person who longs to be seen.
He’s mysterious. And that mystery can be endearing to us, not threatening, if we embrace it.
While my friends may have not believed it, or could not understand it, my sudden darkness wasn’t God’s judgement or removal, it was his maturing me in The Way. Had I known that then, had someone helped to show me this, it would have saved me years of despair and guilt.
I didn’t leave my charismatic heart behind, I never will. But now I see it more nuanced. I see that that there’s a time for everything and that just as seasons of charismatic outpouring are important, so are dry seasons that grow other muscles of love.
As it turns out, it was in the crucible of that darkness and wrestle in my later 20’s that God birthed my unshakable knowledge of His love for me.
And my unshakable love for him.
I'm in tears. I have been on a very similar path, Strahan. Everything that you said is what the Lord has been teaching me and leading me through for the past two or three years. I have grown so much and come to know Him ever more sweetly and intimately through seasons of change. I thank Jesus for your life, brother! Blessings to you
My soul is feeling so seen after reading your articulation of this process! Yes! Yes! Yes! My friends in different streams have been critical and insistent, “if you…” Maybe instead we could see the streams to help us flow where God has us, to trust God more. Grow all our muscles Lord! And let us be people who sit and listen as we watch for Him together through ever bend, valley and mountain top! Thank you for your wise words.