When writing about the work of Edith Stein (Carmelite nun and philosopher), Fanny Howe asks, "Can you build a vocabulary of faith out of a rhetoric first made of dread and then stand behind this new language? Is faith created by a shift in rhetoric, one that can be consciously constructed, or must there be a shattering experience, one that trashes the old words for things?" (The Wedding Dress, 59). What you're talking about here, about keeping hell ever-present in one's mind, sounds like some combination of these two--a rhetoric shift and a shattering. Our words for our faith must change (or vibe-shift) because "the violence and terror of this life" cannot be afforded to be ignored, and therefore must be incorporated into our faith.
It strikes me that faith persists when it becomes inherently tied to contingency. I grew up in the church, went to a Christian college, and most of the people my age that I met in these places either venomously reject Christianity or have simply decided that faith is "no longer for them." I don't blame them--most of what we were taught about faith was the earnest-yet-insecure certainty of American Evangelicalism, the posture of which might be best represented in the Nicene creed with its conspicuous omissions, as you mentioned, and which was often captured by culture war, not practice. All of their problems with Christianity were also my problems with Christianity, but my faith persisted/persists by this exact process you're talking about, by seeing the abyss as a necessary part of the sacred. This became particularly important when my wife was diagnosed with epilepsy. Her seizures were hell. "It is like watching hell run through someone's body," I would tell people. Until then, I don't think I truly understood what C.S. Lewis meant, in "A Grief Observed," when he wrote, " I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?...What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?" (29). Lewis suggests that the answer is to "Set Christ against" all the countervailing evidence, but admits that this answer is still unsatisfactory. Christ's embodiment, his death, his final words, "Why have You forsaken me?", suggest that Christ was subject to the same trap and the same uncertainty of life. But in this unsatisfactory answer is the only hope. Christ deifies our suffering by suffering it. By committing himself to the contingency of human life, Christ became the contingency.
From Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss": "If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God can be no half measure. He can't float over the chaos of pain and particles in which we're mired, and we can't think of him gliding among our ancestors like some shiny, sinless superhero...No, God is given over to matter, to the ultimate Uncertainty Principal. There's no release from reality, no "outside" or "beyond" from which some transforming touch might come. But what a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck" (17).
When writing about the work of Edith Stein (Carmelite nun and philosopher), Fanny Howe asks, "Can you build a vocabulary of faith out of a rhetoric first made of dread and then stand behind this new language? Is faith created by a shift in rhetoric, one that can be consciously constructed, or must there be a shattering experience, one that trashes the old words for things?" (The Wedding Dress, 59). What you're talking about here, about keeping hell ever-present in one's mind, sounds like some combination of these two--a rhetoric shift and a shattering. Our words for our faith must change (or vibe-shift) because "the violence and terror of this life" cannot be afforded to be ignored, and therefore must be incorporated into our faith.
It strikes me that faith persists when it becomes inherently tied to contingency. I grew up in the church, went to a Christian college, and most of the people my age that I met in these places either venomously reject Christianity or have simply decided that faith is "no longer for them." I don't blame them--most of what we were taught about faith was the earnest-yet-insecure certainty of American Evangelicalism, the posture of which might be best represented in the Nicene creed with its conspicuous omissions, as you mentioned, and which was often captured by culture war, not practice. All of their problems with Christianity were also my problems with Christianity, but my faith persisted/persists by this exact process you're talking about, by seeing the abyss as a necessary part of the sacred. This became particularly important when my wife was diagnosed with epilepsy. Her seizures were hell. "It is like watching hell run through someone's body," I would tell people. Until then, I don't think I truly understood what C.S. Lewis meant, in "A Grief Observed," when he wrote, " I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?...What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?" (29). Lewis suggests that the answer is to "Set Christ against" all the countervailing evidence, but admits that this answer is still unsatisfactory. Christ's embodiment, his death, his final words, "Why have You forsaken me?", suggest that Christ was subject to the same trap and the same uncertainty of life. But in this unsatisfactory answer is the only hope. Christ deifies our suffering by suffering it. By committing himself to the contingency of human life, Christ became the contingency.
From Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss": "If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God can be no half measure. He can't float over the chaos of pain and particles in which we're mired, and we can't think of him gliding among our ancestors like some shiny, sinless superhero...No, God is given over to matter, to the ultimate Uncertainty Principal. There's no release from reality, no "outside" or "beyond" from which some transforming touch might come. But what a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck" (17).
Loved this post.