The mother of the "love of
my life" died when Bettyann was eight years old, therefore, for forty
seven years of married life I have had a deep-seated impression of a parent in
the life of a woman who has long been familiar to me. The giant place our
parents occupy from birth to death is as plain as the life they
initiated. It has been far less familiar, however, to consider that the
massive giant which occupies this place might be the absence of that person,
inasmuch as the person herself. "It doesn't matter who my father
was," Anne Sexton once wrote, "it matters who I remember he
was." My experience has been; the looming memory of an absent mother
is every bit as big as a present one, maybe bigger. Absence itself can
become something of a presence.
It is
little wonder that the deepest struggle I have had with faith is in the absence
of God. I learned early that absence is
a characteristic connected to despair, wrought from disconnectedness, or born
of devastation. As a result, I still struggle at times knowing how to reconcile
the God who appears in burning bushes and dirty stables, who descends ladders
and rends the heavens, but whose crushing silence feels every bit as
profound. Sometimes I don't know what to do with the ruinous sensation of
neglect when seeming God comes so close to some of my dearest friends but
remains far off from me. I hold in mind the one who came near the
rejected Samaritan woman, but I uncomfortably suspect that I might have been
given something else, or worse, that he has for some reason withdrawn. The
sting of abandonment is overwhelming; with Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Our
prayer seems lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence
dies."
Though it does not always come as a consolation, the Bible recounts similar difficulties and suspicions from some of God’s closest followers. "There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you," says Isaiah, "for you have hidden your face from us" (Isaiah 64:7). "Why should you be like a stranger in the land," demands Jeremiah, "like a traveler turning aside for the night?" (Jeremiah 14:8). There is something consoling in knowing that any relationship—even that of a prophet of God—goes through the ebbs and flows of intimacy with the divine. Even the Son of the God cried out at the sensation of God’s withdrawal: "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" Nonetheless, knowing that I am not alone in my pain is not the consolation I seek. Misery's company does not, any more than reason or rationale itself, have much to say to the wife who wants to know why mother died so young; this is not what she is looking for.
A far better consolation would be the assurance that she never died in the first place. I suppose anyone who has known the sting of abandonment will understandably find such a claim near impossible to fathom. A distant God is every bit as real and hurtful as a missing parent. And I have surely known his absence. I have lived with the injurious silence of a one-way relationship. I have known the cold echo of an empty room, unanswered cries, the ache of loss.
But what if the absence of God was not at all like that of an absent parent? What if the moments when God’s distance was most palpable were in fact moments most full of God’s hope and love? As Alister McGrath suggests in Mystery of the Cross, "God is active and present in his world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent fromCalvary ,
only to have its verdict humiliatingly overturned on the third day."
What if the darkened experiences of God’s distance were filled with the promise
that he has gone only momentarily to prepare me a room?
Such a leave of absence is no more permanent than the absence of a father who has gone off to work in the morning with the promise to return before bedtime. Such a distance is marked not with isolation and disconnection, but with love and communion. It is the kind of absence that takes on the characteristics of a presence. It is the kind of distance somehow brimming with the promise: I will never leave you or forsake you.
Though it does not always come as a consolation, the Bible recounts similar difficulties and suspicions from some of God’s closest followers. "There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you," says Isaiah, "for you have hidden your face from us" (Isaiah 64:7). "Why should you be like a stranger in the land," demands Jeremiah, "like a traveler turning aside for the night?" (Jeremiah 14:8). There is something consoling in knowing that any relationship—even that of a prophet of God—goes through the ebbs and flows of intimacy with the divine. Even the Son of the God cried out at the sensation of God’s withdrawal: "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" Nonetheless, knowing that I am not alone in my pain is not the consolation I seek. Misery's company does not, any more than reason or rationale itself, have much to say to the wife who wants to know why mother died so young; this is not what she is looking for.
A far better consolation would be the assurance that she never died in the first place. I suppose anyone who has known the sting of abandonment will understandably find such a claim near impossible to fathom. A distant God is every bit as real and hurtful as a missing parent. And I have surely known his absence. I have lived with the injurious silence of a one-way relationship. I have known the cold echo of an empty room, unanswered cries, the ache of loss.
But what if the absence of God was not at all like that of an absent parent? What if the moments when God’s distance was most palpable were in fact moments most full of God’s hope and love? As Alister McGrath suggests in Mystery of the Cross, "God is active and present in his world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent from
Such a leave of absence is no more permanent than the absence of a father who has gone off to work in the morning with the promise to return before bedtime. Such a distance is marked not with isolation and disconnection, but with love and communion. It is the kind of absence that takes on the characteristics of a presence. It is the kind of distance somehow brimming with the promise: I will never leave you or forsake you.
