Suffering Through Absence

There where two of us left at the oiled clothed, picnic type table, where each morning we have breakfast with a dozen or two from the valley and nearby hallows. Both of us are in our seventies: he in his late and me in the early decade.  It was an unusual two hours, as our conversation shifted into talking openly, over refills of coffee and then an empty styrofoam cup, about our lives from the time of our beginnings to the present. Most revealing was the effects of the sadness at the events surrounding the loss of our fathers. My, now friend, lost his father twice. The first time, he was lost through divorce when my friend was just a young child. He was left to grow up in the glaring presence of his father's absence. The second time, his father was lost to him through death, just as he had begun to experience the renaissance of their relationship. Given just a few glimpses of his father's presence, my friend has lived the majority of his life in the midst of his father's absence. In suffering the absence of his earthly father, not by any choice of his own, my friend struggles to understand God’s presence in his life. It is difficult not to view God as one views one's own parents or caregivers. And so, my friend persistently seeks after God, even though his experience of God is one of absence.

We spent a lenghty period of our conversation about how this same experience of absence, sadly, has repeated itself over and over again in the ravaged testimonies of those who struggle to hold on to faith, or those who have lost faith altogether. We reminded each other and gave examples where acts of violence and suffering in our communities seemingly go on without notice and unchecked by divine government. We both agreed that those who live in the midst of absence too often experience a cruel vacancy; an empty throne room with an empty throne.

In recent days, I’ve been reminded of the words of Job, ancient in origin, speaking the same language of absence of which, at least, my new found friend and I am still, in some way, experiencing today:

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,
And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;
When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him; He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.

The story of Job is at least in part a story of God's absence. While the narrator of the story and the readers of the story know the beginning and the end, Job finds himself in the silent middle struck down by tragedy. His story painfully reminds me of the mystery, when in moments of great need, God has been too often missing. Job's cry has beenmy cry, Oh that I knew where I might find Him that I might come to his seat. Job clings tenaciously to the hope that he would find God, and find a just God in his case. "I am not silenced by the darkness," Job proclaims, "nor deep gloom which covers me" Job 23: 17.
Called to "light the light of those in darkness on earth," Mother Teresa wrote in Come Be My Light, that if she ever became a saint, "I will surely be one of darkness." The paradoxical and unsuspected reality of her mission to the poorest of the poor in this world would be that she herself would live in terrible darkness and in the midst of God's absence. In the middle of her ministry, she wrote to one of her spiritual directors, "This untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God which gives me that pain deep down in my heart...is such that I really do not see....The place of God in my soul is blank...I just long for God and then it is that I feel—He does not want me, He is not there....I hear my own heart cry out, 'My God' and nothing else comes. The torture and the pain I can't explain."

At times, not unlike me and my fatherless friend, like the anguished Job, Mother Teresa experienced the profound pain of the absence of God in her life as she ministered to those largely absent from the radar of compassion and care. She, herself was a light, but she experienced little light in her own heart and life. She was indeed a light in the darkness, but she experienced little of the illumination of God's comforting presence in her own dark existence.

And yet, the paradox of her life reminds me all toward  spiritual and mental health, that the experience of God's absence need not lead me to the darkness of despair, or to conclude that God is not there or does not exist, but can propel me to embody God's presence to others who grope for God in the darkness, assured by my own search that there is indeed someone to find. Even in my father’s death and my friend's experience of fatherlessness, He brings comfort and care by sharing His story through writing. And perhaps, as I give the gift of presence to others, I will experience God anew, just as Job did: Job 42:5 I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee. 

Father, I give You all my praise this morning, especially when I am reminded of the Psalmist's words. "If I go up to the heavens, You are there;  if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even ther Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast.