Absence Makes the Heart Grow Warmer?

A couple of weeks ago, laying awake in the bed one very early morning, at Quiet Rest, I just couldn’t let it go.  I had just entered “Dark and Cramped,” in my journal, yet the issue of God’s pursuit was still swimming around in my head.  Bettyann had not attended me on this quick trip. Her absence caused, what I call “desperation in absence.”  The day previous, I had left, standing in the drive-way a beloved brother and sister-in-law, of whom I missed also. This was compounding the sense of absence.  The longer I lay there I began imagining Bettyann’s long, warm embrace, sweet welcoming and more kisses than usual. Her presence seemed almost real in the moment.  There also came moments of a joyful sense when recalling the farewell hugs and embracing of Bettyann’s sister and her husband. What was this intertwining all about? 

Going to my lounge chair, as my routine would have it, crowning head phones with iHeart classical music, I chose the book on top of my stack next to my chair which I had left when evacuating last November. Then a God thing happened! The book is entitled:  This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, which had sat on a book shelf for years, unread. I turned to where I had dog eared the beginning of the poem titled “Moments of Joy” where Denise Levertov relates the story of an old scholar who takes a room on the next street down from his grown children—”the better to concentrate on his unending work, his word, his world.” And though he comes and goes while they sleep, his children feel bereft. They want him nearer. But at times it happens that a son or daughter wakes in the dark and finds him sitting at the foot of the bed, or in the old rocker—”sleepless in his old coat, gazing into invisible distance, but clearly there to protect as he had always done.” The child springs up and flings her arms about him, pressing a cheek to his temple and taking him by surprise: “Abba!” the child exclaims in tears, and Levertov concludes:

“And the old scholar, the father,
is deeply glad to be found.
That’s how it is, Lord, sometimes;
You seek, and I find.” 

I thought at one time, I surmise, as most folk; that the majority of my life has been spent searching for God, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been sought.  Even so, like the children in Levertov’s poem, time and again I have found myself bereft of God’s presence. Sometimes it just feels like I am sitting in the dark.  

A long time ago, during one of my annual, cloistered, spiritual retreats, a Catholic sister told me that God’s presence is not the opposite of God’s absence. At first glance this didn’t seem the least bit encouraging. And yet, maybe I have seen this notion lived out after all. For even when I am most stirred by God’s nearness—when God’s presence seems an undeniable truth—am I not also simultaneously stung by the ache of longing to be nearer or the reality of not quite yet being at home? Even in my best encounters with God, presence and absence remain intertwined. What might this then mean for the moments when I am feeling tormented by God’s absence?

As a wee tyke, my grandmother would give me a flashlight, assuring me she would be within ear shot, when I admitted I was afraid of the dark. That simple and kind act of over sixty years ago suggested then and suggests now that the dark does not imply the absence of a caring person. “Though an army besiege me,” says David  in Psalm 27, “my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then will I be confident”.  I think that David’s confidence wasn’t in the absence of darkness, but in the knowledge of the one who watched over him in the dark. “I am still confident of this,” he concludes. “I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living”.

I have no misgivings that all though I might struggle when God seems far off, it need not be without hope. When the land was dark with the death of Christ weighing on its shoulders, God exhaustively sought despairing hearts in the thick of that darkness. And I testify today that the risen Christ is still the certainty of God’s nearness and the promise of his care in the dark. “Thus,” writes Os Guinness in Unspeakable , “Christians do not say to God, ‘I do not understand you at all, but I trust you anyway.’ That would be suicidal. Rather, they say, ‘Father, I do not understand you, but I trust you’—or more accurately, ‘I do not understand you in this situation, but I understand why I trust you anyway.’ It is therefore reasonable to trust even when we do not understand. We may be in the dark about what God is doing, but we are not in the dark about God.”

Father, God, You know how many times I’ve bewailed (new word for me) You standing silent as I’ve cried, disoriented in the dark and desperately reaching for something to make it better.  You were there all along?  I’m seeing that there is reason to be awed by You who says, “Follow me!” and expects me to trust that I won’t be left or forsaken.  I’m coming to realize that I actually should fear You, Who won’t let go, Whose persistence I might even find exhausting and Whose faith in me I find terrifying.  I’m also recognizing there is reason to be humbled by You since You refuse to leave despite the words I shout in unawareness and my unrelenting waywardness. Going forward I think I will most likely do better to marvel at Your hand I see clearly through the blinding pain of aging.  Though uncertainty may surround me at times and the darkness bids me to see that no Father is there, help me trust You nonetheless.