Alicia Britt Chole

Review: The Night is Normal

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The Night is Normal, Alicia Britt Chole. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2023.

Summary: A study of spiritual disillusionment, proposing that this “night faith” in times of pain may root us more deeply in God and ground us more firmly in reality.

There are few things more emotionally painful than disillusionment with God, others, or even ourselves. A pursuit of what seemed a clear calling of God ends up as an abject failure; a community that began with such warmth and vision becomes toxic; or we realize how flawed our notions of our spiritual progress are when we discover how hard others find it to abide our presence. Sometimes it is simply the profound absence of God after years of a warm sense of his presence, for no reason we can discern.

Alicia Britt Chole proposes that such “night” experiences, as distressing as they may be to us, are not the enemy. In a book that is uncompromisingly honest about the painfulness of such experiences, Chole urges us not to bail on God, others, or our lives. Disillusionment, surprisingly, is a friend. After an extensive study of the word, she personally defines disillusionment as “the painful gaining of reality.”

That’s right. Disillusionment opens our eyes to reality by puncturing illusions we have about God, the world, others, and ourselves–all the ways we have been living in unreality that prevent us from growing into the people God intends us to be, growing in a faith that is resilient, that trusts when it can’t see in the night. When we refuse to bail and believe when we don’t see, we discover love, both that of God for us, and us for God that goes beyond what God does for us.

Having explored the nature of and opportunity within disillusionment, she goes on to explore three forms of disillusionment and how we might respond:

  1. With God. Believing that God is not disillusioned with us. Soaking in scripture (as she does in several chapters). That it consists in honesty and grief. It means exposing the false “if-then” equations in our faith. Tending to our physical health…. And plodding on.
  2. With ourselves. Allow God to be our mentor. Assess our signs for spiritual growth–are they spiritual? View our lives as not a line but a spiral where we come around again and again to the same issues at different points of maturing. Realize that all failures are not sin. Remember that the life of faith is a pilgrimage and not a performance.
  3. With others. Don’t assume that sin is the source. Recognize that our strengths come with shadows. Listen generously. Know when it is not your cow (I loved this one–not all problems are our problems to address). Resist revisionism to explain the pain and love in reality.

Chole enunciates these and other truths in short chapters liberally filled with illustrations. In all of this, her invitation is one to follow Jesus in the night, to not give up but to keep plodding on, allowing the lessons and insights to come as they will.

Don’t stop reading this book at the conclusion. Read the appendices. The first deals with objections based on questions raised to the dissertation version of this book. The second is a table of the times disillusioned appears in translations of the Bible. The third covers related concerns and concepts discussed by a number of contemporary thinkers. This last concludes with these words, as compelling as any in the book:

“Wisdom invites us to recall deeper voices that receive resonance from Eternity. Through history, great thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Yancey agree: the purpose of the darkness, the dark night, the absence, and the disappointment is to purify and empower the soul to know a new dimension of intimacy with God.”

Alicia Britt Chole is too modest to add herself to this list but in this well-researched and approachably-written work, she joins these others in inviting us not to “bail” but to believe, to lean into the pain of disillusionment, allowing God to shatter our illusions and lead us into the deeper realities of his substantive, gritty love for us that does not let us go.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: 40 Days of Decrease

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40 Days of Decrease

40 Days of Decrease, Alicia Britt Chole. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016.

Summary: A collection of 40 readings, reflections, and different kinds of fasts that encourage us to “thin our lives to thicken our communion with God.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I first looked at this book. Would this be a collection of cheesy meditations and gimmicky ideas of what one might fast from? Having walked through the book, I would confess myself pleasantly surprised, as well as personally stretched, by the meditations, reflections, and ideas Alicia Britt Chole gives us in these pithy, thousand word entries, designed specifically for the season of Lent, but usable at any time of the year.

Each one of the days is designed as follows: a meditation focused around the journey of Jesus to the cross, a brief reflection, which leads into the fast of the day. These are followed by a more scholarly piece on the history of the Lenten fast, around which this book is organized. There is then a reading for the day taken from a passage in John 12 to 21 (consecutively) and room for one’s own reflections to be jotted down.

In the introduction to the 40 days, Chole writes, “As we experience this sacred season and the holiness of loss and less in Jesus’ journey cross-ward, may our hearts open vulnerably to a greater commitment to love and be loved by the Savior.” The aim of the “decreases” of the different fasts she proposes is an increase in our hunger for communion with God.

While she does include some of the more expected kinds of fasts from food, from speaking, and from sound, she also proposes a number of “fasts” one might not consider but in fact open us up to encountering God in new ways. For example, early on she encourages fasting from regrets for a day, recalling that our gospel hope is that Christ is “making all things new.” Another day, she challenges us to fast from “religious profiling” that underestimates the spiritual potential of certain groups of people. Another day, we are encouraged to fast appearances, and the ways we inflate or deflate, exaggerate or conceal who we are and come to Jesus to help us understand why we do this. I liked one of the later fasts, as one engaged in ministry, which was fasting from “God as job”, which involves “taking care of Jesus’ stuff but not attending to his voice.”

One of the last fasts was one of the most powerful. On Day Thirty Nine, we are encouraged to fast “guarding the tomb” of our past sins, shameful acts, and dead things. She encourages us that in rolling the stone away from such “tombs” that the grave is empty, forgiven by the Risen Lord who “is not here.”

The short pieces at the end, most of which focus on the history of Lent and how this came to be a forty day period related to the preparation of baptismal candidates, are quite informative. Providing a daily reading in John’s passion narrative leaves room for God to speak and meet us in the gospel narrative. All told, what Chole gives us are carefully crafted meditations and reflections, “fasts” that uncover many of the unhelpful attachments that accrete in our lives, and space to decrease that He might increase in our lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”