I Explained It Away And Now It Is Gone

She did not lose her faith. She wants that distinction kept, because it is the accurate one and she is careful.

What she did was read about the brain.

It started innocently, with a book about grief, and then a book about crowds and singing, and then a good deal about how a nervous system behaves under low light and repetitive music and the presence of a hundred people doing the same thing at the same time.

And every single thing she had ever called the presence of God turned out to have a name.

The tightening in her chest during the third song. The sense of being addressed. The certainty that arrived at two in the morning at her mother's bedside. The peace she used to feel walking home. All of it mapped, all of it explicable, all of it perfectly ordinary human machinery doing what it does.

She is not angry about this. She has not become a cynic and she despises the tone that usually comes with what she is describing.

But she cannot un-know it, and here is the position she is now in.

She thinks she never had anything.

Not that He left. That would require Him to have been there. She thinks she had a nervous system and a set of rooms designed to move it, and that she has now taken the machine apart on the kitchen table and cannot find the ghost anywhere in the pieces.

And so when she prays, which she still does most days out of something between habit and loyalty, she is speaking into a room that she has personally proved is empty, and it feels less like unbelief than like tidying a house nobody lives in.

And that is you at your own table, or you would not still be reading.

John gives a test, and it is not the one you failed

You are the sort of person who wants a criterion. Here is one, offered by a man who was writing to people who had begun to doubt the whole thing, and notice what he does not use.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.1 John 4:13

He does not say: by this we know, because of what you felt during the singing. He does not offer sensation as the evidence. He offers a giving, in the past tense, done by God, and that is the whole test.

He has given. Not you have felt. The evidence John points at is not located inside your experience at all, which means dismantling your experience does not reach it.

You are indwelt on the basis of something God did, and your analysis never touched that. It is written, by this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit (1 John 4:13). The Holy Spirit is in a woman who has taken the machine apart and found no ghost in it, because He was never one of the pieces.

Now the step in your reasoning, and I want to name it precisely because a vague comfort is no use to you.

You demonstrated that every experience you had of Him has a physical description. That is almost certainly true and it is not in dispute here. But you then treated the physical description as a replacement rather than a mechanism, and that is the step that does not hold. Everything you have ever experienced has a physical description. Reading this sentence does. Loving your son does. A description of how something happens in a body is not an account of whether anything was there, and you would not accept that move in any other domain.

You are not left with nothing, and your finding was never a finding about His existence. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), a witness that runs underneath the reportable feelings rather than in place of them. The Holy Spirit does not stop bearing witness when a woman becomes able to describe the machinery.

And here is the last of it, plain, with nothing attached.

He is here. In the room you have proved is empty. Not as a feeling that might come back if you stop reading and lower the lights.

You are not cast off, and no argument you can construct changes that. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never does not wait for you to be persuaded. The Holy Spirit has been in the room for every one of the prayers you thought you were saying to nobody.