In the Dark: A Memoir of Religious Initiation, Doubt, Rebellion, and Discovery

By Scott Stickney

This book is risky. Challenging nave optimism and the illusion of certainty in shallow religion, the author cites a Judeo-Christian faith that has left us in the dark, so that we can never know what God is up to, whether hes coming or going (Ecclesiastes 3, The Message).

And yet, the invitation is to explore authentic spiritual formation by balancing the objective with the subjective, the historically given Holy Bible with a private mystical quest. Illustrating this with his own life, the author reveals a deeply meaningful existence that is available and includes a full range of pathos whereby the secrets of his [her] heart will be laid bare. So he [she] will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, God is really among you! (1 Corinthians 14:25, New International Version).

WestBow Press (a division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan) named In The Dark as a top ten finalist in the 2015 New Look Writing Contest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512744996

Scott Stickney

Scott Stickney earned a B.A. Degree in Psychology and studied for two years at a theological seminary. An ordained elder in the Nazarene denomination, Scott served as a pastor in local churches for over two decades. Now residing in western Oregon, he enjoys the rain of the Pacific Northwest and continues to build depth and substance as a husband, dad, and practitioner in the mysticism of darkness.

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INTRODUCTION

Question Boldly!

I sat in the communal dark of a theater next to my teenage son watching a movie starring some big Hollywood names. It lacked a sustainable, worthwhile plot, but a twice-repeated line that prompted a huge laugh from the audience caught my attention.

On our way home, the silly quip started great dialogue between father and son. Expressing the materialistic worldview of our day, the line was God is nothing more than an imaginary friend for adults! We got caught up in the discussion; we didn’t censor our thoughts. Without even necessarily agreeing with our own opinions, the two of us nonetheless enjoyed our probing conversation.

Interestingly enough, it continues; we commonly engage in exchanges on the topics of religion and theology with respectful listening and the exchange of risky and sometimes unconventional statements.

Thomas Jefferson, our third president and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, offered counsel that reverberated in our father-and-son give-and-take discussions: Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, He must approve of the homage of reason.

My son is now in his late twenties and serves as a full-time youth pastor at a Protestant church; he ministers to middle school, high school, and college students. I’m a proud dad who delights in his preaching (once a quarter) at Sunday-morning worship. I recognize his heart for digging into the relevance of the Judeo-Christian heritage and investing especially in teenagers and his peers. It’s all the more reason for us to create opportunities to think out loud together; the dialogue is important.

That’s what I hope to do with you, the reader. I don’t have a critical spirit, but I’m concerned that too much of what I see and hear in promotion of the Judeo-Christian faith is glib. I intend to get you thinking, probing, and perhaps reconsidering some long-held assumptions.

Religion often trumpets certainty, but I hold deep respect for the writer in the Bible who admitted, This is a huge mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it all (Ephesians 5 MSG). Instead of unraveling this huge mystery, I promise to avoid the position of Stuart Smalley, comedian Al Franken’s best-known character on Saturday Night Live. Before his 2009 vocational change to that of a Minnesota senator and going to Washington, DC, he wrote for and performed on SNL from 1975 to 1995. Delving into the character of a self-help talk-show host, Stuart Smalley was the maestro of faux sincerity and quick with the signature phrase I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and … people like me.

I’ll tackle the possibilities of a Divine Presence, but I won’t base it on my being good enough, smart enough, or popular. I’ve never been directed to the line where halos were being handed out; much of my spiritual formation happened in the equivalent of a dark, interior theater (For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love - Galatians 5 MSG).

Rather than being in the dark, organized religion often involves bright lights where absolutes are promoted. But I was familiar with something far more interior and private, because for reasons yet to be explained, my mysticism of darkness started when I was a boy and began attending Professor Night lectures each evening. Their words aren’t heard, their voices aren’t recorded, But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere (Psalm 19 MSG).

In the decades since, I’m especially grateful for the mystical writings of Juan de Yepes, a sixteenth-century Spanish monk better known as John of the Cross. He originated the well-known phrase the dark night of the soul (his writings are in the public domain because he died at least a hundred years ago). I’m also thankful for Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose writings are now considered to be from the late fifth to the early sixth centuries. He addressed the challenging question of how we can experience the divine darkness.

Let me add that these teachings are outside the Wesleyan tradition I was born into. Whereas the mystics include darkness among the blessings of God, it was John Wesley who denied the necessity of a dark night of the soul. And yet, John Wesley wrote that the mystics had an amazing genius…we have all the gold that is in them without the dross…

Part of this treasure hunt is to present a formula for extracting the gold from the dross without being intimidated with unfamiliar terminology or limited to a particular line of thought. This is why, in my life story, the creative powers of four innovators are also included. Valued as my in-print mentors, I hope my readers will seriously consider the lives of these historical figures, their quotations and their theories, so that a deeper and far-more diverse Judeo-Christian heritage will emerge. This overflow of substance includes the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (whose works are in the public domain as well), Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and American cartoonist Charles Schulz.

In this book, I draw on two translations of the Bible. Neither the New International Version (NIV) nor The Message (MSG) existed in my early years, but they’ve become my choice for studying Scripture in the decades since. I provide questions for my readers at the end of each chapter, their opportunity to enter the dialogue.

Just as Jefferson challenged us to question with boldness, I close with a challenge made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, our thirty-second president. In a celebrated speech, he articulated for our nation what I consider to be each person’s responsibility when it comes to the practice of religion and considering the possibilities of a Divine Presence: The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

—Scott

CHAPTER 1

A Charlie Brown Complex

A newspaper article reported on the seventy-fifth birthday of the creator of Peanuts . It celebrated the career of Charles Schulz and noted that for more than fifty years the cartoonist had produced one of the most-read comic strips of all time. (Schulz died the day before his final original Sunday Peanuts on February 13, 2000, at age 77. Reprints of his comic strips still appear in nearly every daily and Sunday newspaper, ranking Charles Schulz, according to Forbes , as the number three top-earning dead celebrity in 2015, at forty million a year.) Reflecting on a typical workday, Charles Schulz had said, You know, I’m happiest when I’m going to the ice arena every morning, reading the newspaper, coming up with what I think is a great idea and coming over to my drawing board.

That quote set off memories in my mind like Fourth of July fireworks. The Schulz family had generously built an Olympic-sized, public ice rink in my childhood hometown. During the 1960s in Santa Rosa, California, the Redwood Empire Ice Arena was one of my favorite hangouts.

I’d occasionally spot Schulz, our local celebrity, in the arena’s snack bar as I was forcing my long, narrow feet into rented skates that tended to be too wide. I’d cast admiring glances at the famed cartoonist as I tried to walk gingerly to the ice and keep my ankles from buckling.

Once on the ice, my inspiration was Schulz’s cartoon beagle, Snoopy. Charlie Brown’s dog attempts to offer motives for his erratic behavior. Admitting to days when he feels off balance, he can resolve this by projecting his attitude on a cat. Otherwise, Snoopy thinks, I feel like if I don’t bite a cat before sundown, I’ll go crazy! But then I just take a deep breath and forget about it. That’s what is known as real maturity!

I was unable to explain my behavior and motives, or achieve anything close to maturity at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. But I did manage to gain some speed before digging the blades into the ice with a parallel stop. Sending sprays of ice flying, this represented to me Snoopy’s athleticism when playing hockey in Peanuts.

However, my actions didn’t endear me to the cute girls I was trying to impress. They would brush ice chips out of their hair from my dramatic stops, exit the rink, and huddle in a corner booth of the snack bar. It’s primarily through relationships that we learn about ourselves. Having thought my performance on the ice had been nothing but stellar, I was surprised to be confronted with their sneers in the snack bar. Their reaction made me second-guess everything about myself.

Jung introduced a number of psychological terms. His theory of psychological complexes held that we push aside clusters of emotions originating from experiences with primary relationships and bury them deep in our unconscious. A lifetime later, I refer to confusing life scenes like this one from the ice rink as my Charlie Brown complex.

Familiar with ridicule, defeat, and insecurities, good ol’ Charlie Brown also has the indomitable spirit to bounce back from obstacles. I was confused by the girls’ reactions, but I was even more confused by the anxiety and insecurity their response triggered in my psyche—the Charlie Brown complex. Where had it come from? Had I even in my youth already buried an array of unexamined feelings? As I entered that snack bar, my evaluation was similar to Charlie Brown’s ruminations: I mean, I’m not rough or crude or anything … I’m not the greatest person who ever lived, but who is? I’m just a nice sort of guy.

The Sabbath

I had no control over my heredity and the environment into which I was born in 1958. My childhood occurred in the decade known as the sixties, but I was subjected to a strict parental control pattern that was a relic of the fifties. It’s impossible to understand a person’s character without exploring his or her childhood, so regarding what’s coming next in my narrative, Dr. Sigmund Freud brings insight.

In every psychoanalytic investigation of a life history, it usually happens that the first recollection to which the patient gives precedence, with which he introduces the story of his life, proves to be the most important, the very one that holds the key to the secret pages of his mind.

My dad was a full-time Protestant minister, and it wasn’t long before my anthem became the sixties’ hit, Son of a Preacher Man, sung by Dusty Springfield. Required to be front and center at church every Sabbath, my dad would arrive early and conduct his religious duties for the congregation. That meant parenting responsibilities fell to my mom. Looking intently into my eyes and trying to hold my young attention, she communicated a warped interpretation of the Hebrew verb for Sabbath. The actual translation is to cease, stop, interrupt, as in the stoppage of the workweek; this ancient practice is centered on the Hebrew word menuchah, to rest. Our Judeo-Christian household honored the Sabbath day in a way expressed by Rabbi Elijah of Vilna.

God stopped [the Genesis creation story ends with the seventh day, when the Creator rested from the work He had done] to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so.

As a single parent for the day, my mom misinterpreted the Hebrew translation for Sabbath by reiterating before ever leaving the parsonage, and again as we sat in the sanctuary, "Now Scott, during our time at church, I need you to cease from any laughter and use only a quiet voice. You need to stop all your normal activity as a boy. Instead, I need you to sit still and be quiet. If in any way you interrupt the proceedings of the church service, your father will have a talk with you!"

Crossing that holy threshold and donning a religious straitjacket went against everything I wanted to be and do. I was a wiggle worm of a boy; the Sabbath put a lid on my natural energy and demanded a focus I didn’t possess, but my mother set her expectations. Regardless of how I felt or whether I felt anything at all, I was to sit attentively throughout the proceedings conducted in hushed, stained-glass tones—impossible for someone aspiring to be Snoopy on skates.

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote of being dominated by a religiously devout and rigid father: As a child, I was strictly and most severely trained in the Christian religion. My religious foundation was similar. A sense of self develops through one’s shared experiences with other people (just like with the girls at the ice rink); as a consequence, my relationship with the Judeo-Christian heritage has been complex and ambivalent.

Through trial and error, I finally realized that any talk with my preacher dad involved little in the way of words. When he bent me over his knee for a spanking, the exasperation on his face communicated that I wasn’t measuring up. Freud called any inhibition in children due to punishment and concern for losing a parent’s love an instinctual renunciation. Such parent-child encounters transmit powerful, sustained messages. However, my dad’s intent was to obey the biblical mandate, He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him (Proverbs 13:24 NIV).

In seeking to uncover the why behind my Charlie Brown complex, I start with my dad’s overreliance on spankings. Those unsettling sneers from the girls at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena would one day reflect my early and repeated encounters with my dad. Though his spankings were never physically abusive, his exasperation turned into a sneer of determination to somehow reform his firstborn.

Interacting with Little Green Men

By the time they became members of our family, my younger brother and sister benefited from a staffed nursery provided at the church facility. I had been born into a church structure before that luxury. Due to the adult-oriented Sabbath day services and a variety of other ministries that included weddings, funerals, potluck dinners, and organizational meetings, my parents finally agreed, after more spankings than I care to recount, that a diversion of some kind was needed to help promote my ceasing, stopping, and not interrupting.

In the limited aisle of the toy section at the drug store, my mom purchased a bag of green plastic army men (these tiny heroes had been manufactured and provided as toys since 1938). Much to my relief and delight, these inch-long soldiers in fixed stances accompanied us to all church functions. (This was obviously way before the digital wonders of iPods, video games, and smartphones.)

My parents did a lot of things right. In fact, some of their parenting skills were validated by the marshmallow test conducted by a Stanford University psychologist, Dr. Walter Mischel. Preschoolers were positioned at a desk and instructed that they could eat a visible marshmallow whenever they wanted to. Issuing a further challenge, they were told that if they waited until an adult returned to the room, they could have that marshmallow and an additional one.

The study followed these four-year-olds into their teenage years and discovered that those who had waited for the two marshmallows achieved much higher SAT scores and better academic success. The conclusion of this research is that the early learning of self-control, patience, and long-term thinking skills provided abilities needed for doing well in school and in life.

So the soldiers would be packed in a Tupperware container and accompany us to Sabbath day services. If I showed self-restraint and the ability to delay gratification, my mom would hand over my closest confidants, and I would tap into those repressed, smoldering clusters of emotions. Making a deep descent into my Charlie Brown complex, focusing on my soldiers’ soundless wars prepared me for the reality in everyday life because discord and ordeals are an aspect of the human condition. And ultimately, such battles can personally lead to a religious solution. So as a spiritual temperament and imaginative sensitivity were nurtured by these tiny soldiers, I immersed myself into a world of play that was not purely objective.

Jung was an only child for his first nine years and thoroughly enjoyed solitary play as a boy. Many of his experiences in childhood became the seeds for the psychological theories he later developed.

On Sabbath days in the sanctuary teeming with people, music, and preaching, I was able to transcend my own skin through the power of imagination and enter worlds larger than mine. Though rational thinking is highly valued in our society (and should be), another kind of thinking employs images rather than concepts; this other way of thinking took root in my life. Absent an alien abduction, I was being prepared by my little green men to take a unique direction in life as powers from the dark, interior theater of my psyche emerged. (I’ll use the concept of the soul and its contemporary equivalent, the psyche, interchangeably.)

Kierkegaard’s father was fifty-seven and his mother was forty-five when he became the seventh and last child born into their strict Lutheran household. Kierkegaard’s middle-aged parents lacked the physical energy to keep up with the young Kierkegaard, so his father resorted to imaginary tours inside the confines of their house, describing the history and architecture of European cities. Under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard recounted,

His father was a very severe man … but under his rough coat he concealed a glowing imagination which even old age could not quench. When Johannes occasionally asked permission to go out, he generally refused to give it, though once in a while he proposed instead that Johannes should take his hand and walk back and forth in the room. At first glance this might seem a poor substitute, and yet … they went out of doors to a nearby castle in Spain, or out to the seashore, or about the streets, wherever Johannes wished to go, for the father was equal to anything.

While they would walk back and forth in the room, the father described everything they saw

so accurately, so vividly, so explicitly even to the least details … that after half an hour of such a walk with his father he was as much overwhelmed and fatigued as if he had been a whole day out of doors. Johannes soon learnt from his father how to exercise this magic power.

Imagination is an instrument for self-knowledge. Through an active interaction with the little green army men, I nurtured my inclination to dwell in the solitude of my imagination and tapped that magic power through my army’s battles in foxholes, jungles, and marshes. I was unaware of how playing with the toy soldiers was opening the doors to the insight of English novelist George Eliot, Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Everyone has private thoughts to which no one else has access. That is an incredible power. What transpired in my brain contained a complexity that was unfortunately sidetracked when one particular new product came out in time for the 1964 Christmas shopping season: G.I. Joe, pitched as America’s movable fighting man.

Remaining popular throughout the sixties, it wasn’t until the opposition to the Vietnam War intensified that some parents began to question military related toys. With the initial media blitz, this action figure’s twenty-one moving parts seemed so realistic. Outfitted in the uniforms of the army, navy, marines, and air force, it was a big seller at four dollars apiece; Hasbro sold six million the first year. All I could think about was that twelve-inch-tall action figure. It was the only item on my Christmas list that year, but my dad made it clear I should have been grateful for the army of soldiers already in my possession.

As the creator of NBC’s television program, Freaks and Geeks and the Hollywood Movie, Bridesmaids, Paul Feig grew up reading the paperback collections of Peanuts comic strips. In an interview for the Tribune News Service, Feig accurately commented about Schulz’s creation: ..It’s funny because of its honesty. Nobody has an idyllic life. It’s so reflective of what life is.

More times than not, parents or significant others can be oblivious to the times that their affirmation and approval can make the difference in a healthy sense of self for a child. And although it’s normal for children to feel slighted or deprived in ordinary family matters, as the sensitive boy from Peanuts who wears the zigzag T-shirt laments, A person shouldn’t have to lose all his pride when he’s only six years old.

Rather than concluding that I am overreacting to the impact of the G.I. Joe denial and/or the multiple spankings that accompanied my childhood, consider the findings published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (January 2016). Researchers revealed that self-esteem is developed in children by the age of five. Gaining either a positive or negative view of themselves before entering formal schooling, according to the co-author of the study Dario Cvencek, a research scientist a the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, The first five years seem to be a foundation on which children build for the rest of their lives… It’s [self-esteem] developed and already pretty strong…We do think it’s malleable, but it starts a lot earlier than previously thought.

Too easily dismissed as a diagnosis, low self-esteem is significant and has consequences. Since I was left unsure why a G.I. Joe wasn’t even to be a consideration, the incident provided rich fertilizer for roots of my Charlie Brown complex. Thoughts dictate feelings and feelings lead to behavior, and so as much as I wanted to be like Snoopy (Ice skating is a good way to meet girls!), the more accurate model for my temperament and self-conscious sensitivity was Charlie Brown.

Denied my one Christmas wish left me reeling and feeling like the anguished figure in the painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. One of the art world’s most recognizable images, the Norwegian expressionist painted a man holding his head and screaming. Reenacting this 1895 painting that has become a symbol of human anxiety, deep within the dark, interior theater of my psyche, I let loose with a piercing scream that no one else could hear but me.

Question Boldly

1. Some family researchers have concluded that spanking is an appropriate method of discipline when used properly. What were your experiences with being disciplined and punished by parents, guardians, or significant others? How did it affect you? What do you consider appropriate discipline and punishment for children?

2. What would be two or three benefits in your life if you followed the instructions for the Sabbath as given by Rabbi Elijah of Vilna: Stop creating to think about why you do so?

3. Self-analysis takes practice; it’s a process. Freud gave high priority to the first recollection … that holds the key to the secret pages of his mind. What is your earliest recollection? Why is