Struggling With An Absent God

It was a rainy monday evening, I met my friend, a well respected and admired man in his thirties, inside a chapel. Those close to him knew he was going through a much troubled period. It was a time of such change and turmoil in his life that the good man did not know where to turn. He felt he had lost his bearings, that the things which he believed were secure expressions of God’s will were falling away, and so many of the familiar landmarks of the horizon of his faith had vanished. And yet he was expected to be leading more than a hundred of people into the future, into what he saw only as a dark, trackless future.

Somewhere in the middle of his prayer I heard his voice took on an unaccustomed intensity. “Bro... each morning my prayer has become only this: ‘God, where are you? Are you here? And if you are, on whose side are you? I ask you, and you do not answer me. I no longer know where to turn.’ (His voice broke, for a second.) All I say is: God, where are you?’ over and over again.” – A hush: I had never experienced a silence as charged and responding as the one that filled the chapel that evening. The memory moves me still. Some months later, this man succumbed to depression and ended his life.

Sometime or other in our lives, with many of us at least, we have gone through some comparable experience of anguish, the experience of the absence of God. A moment of failure, when our best-laid plans collapse like a house of cards around us. The death of a loved one, when all at once there is a void in the center of our life, and everything has lost meaning for us. Or, moments after we have been told we have a terminal illness, and only a few months of life left to us. We are tempted to question God. We reach out to him, to hear an answer. We seek the sound of his word or the touch of his hand, the reassurance that he is there and things will go well with us. But we cannot find him. It seems he is not there.

Why does this God who says in the sacred books that he loves us, why does he make himself difficult to find? Why does he hide himself from those who are seeking him, searching for his will, asking to be guided by even a word from his lips, – an answer, an explanation? Why does he make it so painfully difficult, even for his friends? St. Augustine wrote that our hearts are made for God, and cannot find rest until they rest in him. And yet, so difficult it is for men and women to find God, that often, they end up by spending years, sometimes long wandering years, turning away from him, running away from him, avoiding his scrutiny of their thoughts and deeds and lives. Or, if they keep searching, for years they feel their ways in the darkness, assailed by fears and terrors, seeking God amid seeming signs of his creation and presence, but God always out of sight and out of hearing. “Show us the Father,” Philip said to Jesus, “and it is enough.” (John 14:8)

The books of the antiquity of every people and culture, it has been said, are filled with the restless human search for an absent God, a search usually pursued from the crucible of pain. One thinks of the words from Aechylus which Robert Kennedy loved: “And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart… “Even the Bible enshrines the story of the just man Job, who from the midst of innocent suffering confronts God and wrestles with him in spirit, seeking answers – answers which God, even at the end, does not give him.

What comes to my mind is the picture of the stable, the crib, the mother and the Child – is really the answer God finally gives us. His answer is not an explanation; it is not a series of words spoken to our inquiring minds. We still do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and remains for us, a mystery, a confused interplay of light and darkness. “God does not give us explanations; he gives us a Son. He gives up his Son for us.” (Austin Farrer) This Son has come to our world, to a little country town. He has come, and “because there was no room in the inn,” he is born in a stable. “Born of a woman, born under the law,” he came in the nature of man, in the form of a child. His mother: a village girl, about sixteen (it seems), from Nazareth. “…And this shall be a sign unto you: you shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.” No, not an explanation. Not more words, but the Word, the Word-made-flesh, come to dwell with us, come to be one with us and to share our lives, all of our lives. Not an explanation, but a presence. Emmanuel, God who abides with us, who abides with us always, forevermore.

What does it mean, this event which is holy mystery? O, at this point one is tempted to draw out, at length, its meaning. Preachers at Christmas do this laudably, with eloquence and beauty. But it is a temptation to be resisted. At Christmas night, of all nights, it must be resisted.

Instead, we will do to Bethlehem with the shepherds to whom the tidings were first announced. With them we will enter the stable, and like them, fall on our knees. And in the stillness, we shall look; we shall behold:

But see the Virgin blest
Hath laid her babe to rest.

After all the long ages waiting God has come to us, in this child. The young mother – her name is Mary – lays him in the manger.

Come, let us adore him. That is all we need to do. Venite. Venite adoremus Dominum.