Though Janine clearly has some very big problems in her family,
there are few people who have not experienced similar heartache,
at least in some measure. We have all been through times when
God seemed very far away. Periods of spiritual drought, when it
felt like the rain would never come. Periods of anguish or intense
despair, such as when a beloved spouse or child dies.
Where is God?…Go to him when your need is desperate, when all
other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your
face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away…There are no lights in
the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It
seemed so once. What can this mean? Why is he so present in our
time of prosperity and so very absent in time of trouble?
C.S. Lewis
Even the most sincere, the most deeply founded in faith, go through
hours of despair. At such times it is important to continue praying.
Perhaps it will sound as if we are talking into an echo chamber. Or
perhaps we will feel that our efforts are so insignificant, so weak, that
our voice can never reach heaven. But prayer never depends on our
feeling close to God; he is always close to us, and he does hear us.
Janine found relief in talking things out, in sharing her plight
with others. Such openness may seem appalling, in the sense that it
invites vulnerability. But it can lead to healing and new courage,
even if not to a resolution of the problem. Janine also held on by
trying to concentrate on the good parts of her life: at least she is
with her husband, and her children have not run away.
Corinne, a mother of four teenagers,
lives in Philadelphia. Her
husband is incarcerated three hundred miles away, and she has lost
three of her children to the streets. Recently she shared her
troubles with me:
My boys can make much more money running drugs than taking a job, and anyway my youngest is too young to work. I know
he is not just using drugs, he’s addicted to them. He’s been using
marijuana for at least two years, and I’m sure he’s on to stronger
things than that. I’ve already lost him to the streets. I have a
great fear that he will die as a result of violence. I’ve already
begged the state to put him in a residential rehab program so
he can at least have a chance. I pray for him all the time. I do try
to create a sense of family; I have always been strict with my children, who they associate with, but it’s just not enough, with all
the temptations of the street right outside our front door.
Corinne’s situation is far more typical than we might presume, as
drugs and other pervasive social ills continue to rip families apart.
What can we say to comfort such a woman?
Sometimes
I feel old
useless
and ugly
I reach and nothing comes
I speak and no one hears
I sing and no heart is moved
But then I pray
And Lord
You listen
Theresa Greenwood
The distress of these mothers, the bitter anguish that comes from
their God-given love for their children, and many times also from
self-accusation, cannot simply be relieved with well-meant words
of comfort. Perseverance in prayer for their sons and daughters is
indeed their only weapon. But they need to be helped to believe
that in each person’s deepest hidden center there is a spark from
God, and that, even if a person is seemingly lost to grace, ultimately God is in control.
There is no one who is so weak or sinful that God will not hear
him. As the nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney put it:
The very fact that prayer is so great a privilege to sinners, makes
it most honorable to God to hear prayer…He who regards alike
the flight of an archangel and the fall of a sparrow – before
whose eyes no event is too minute for his attention, no insect
too small for his notice – his infinite glory is manifest in this very
fact, that nothing is too lofty or too low for his regard. None are
too insignificant for his sympathy – none too mean to share his
kindness.
Teresa was nineteen
when she was imprisoned and sentenced to
death in 1982, and Miriam, my neighbor, has been corresponding
with her almost ever since. Miriam says that if there is anything
Teresa knows well, it is despair, which she has struggled with even
since her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In August
1989 Teresa wrote:
The parole board wants me to do eight more years before I
come up for parole again. That will be in January 1997. I thought
I would feel a bit more at ease after I did seven years, but now
things seem to be even worse. I feel like I am starting this time
over again but in a harder prison.
How long is seven years? Write a letter to Teresa once a week for
seven years, and you’ll have some idea. And how long are eight
more after that? Teresa writes:
I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care about anything anymore, and I just want to give up. I don’t even dream anymore of
what I’ll do when I get home, because I feel like I’ll never leave
here. This place makes me give up on any kind of good future
that I maybe could have had.
I have gotten so angry and bitter with the people here that
I have backslid very far. I see myself turning cold, and I don’t like
it. I do believe in God, and know that’s who I need in my life, but
it seems so much harder to turn my life over to him this time.
Please keep praying for me.
In 1995 Teresa’s parole was denied for another three years. Then in
May 1998 came another blow:
I found out this weekend that the parole board has asked for
eight
more
years. I am okay, but I am hurt, and my Dad was really
sad because he could not help me get out. But I am still trusting
in God to do a miracle for me.
After getting this news, Miriam asked Teresa what she felt like
when God answered her prayers with a no. Teresa’s answer came in
the form of this poem:
I don’t pretend to know the answer;
I can’t seem to understand.
If God can answer all my prayers,
where is he when I need a hand?
When I cried out for freedom
from behind my prison walls,
He hid himself in silence
and ignored my anguished calls…
It’s not as if my trust has crumbled;
I won’t take it as my fate;
I still have faith that he will let me
through the shining gate.
So in the meantime, when I’m down,
and dreary days grow long,
I’ll do just like that prisoner, Paul:
stand patient, firm and strong.
Sophie Scholl was a twenty-one-year-old
university student
who was active in the “White Rose,” an underground movement
that resisted Hitler’s Third Reich. During her brief imprisonment in
Munich in February 1943 (she was executed only a few days after
her arrest) she wrote to her boyfriend, Fritz, on the Russian front:
The only remedy for a barren heart is prayer, however poor and
inadequate…We must pray, and pray for each other, and if you
were here, I’d fold hands with you, because we’re poor, weak,
sinful children. Oh, Fritz, if I can’t write anything else just now, it’s
only because there’s a terrible absurdity about a drowning man
who, instead of calling for help, launches into a scientific, philosophical, or theological dissertation while the sinister tentacles
of the creatures on the seabed are encircling his arms and legs,
and the waves are breaking over him. It’s only because I’m filled
with fear, that and nothing else, and feel an undivided yearning
for him who can relieve me of it.
I’m still so remote from God that I don’t even sense his presence when I pray. Sometimes when I utter God’s name, in fact, I
feel like sinking into a void. It isn’t a frightening or dizzying sensation, it’s nothing at all – and that’s far more terrible. But prayer
is the only remedy for it, and however many devils scurry around
inside me, I shall cling to the rope God has thrown me, even if my
numb hands can no longer feel it.
The Bible is full of stories of men and women who, like Sophie,
felt abandoned but clung to God anyway. Psalm 130, one of my favorites, begins: “Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord! Hear my
voice, be attentive to my supplications.” If King David, and even
the prophets of Israel, felt themselves to be in such depths of despair, why should we be spared? Yet we can also take comfort in
the words at the end of the same psalm: “Hope in the Lord, for
with him there is steadfast love and plenteous redemption.”
Abraham called the place where God tested his faith by requiring
the sacrifice of his only son, “God sees.” God sees and knows everything. We humans see only what is visible, whereas God looks at
the heart. And therefore we must trust that he knows what is
behind every appearance. There is nothing that does not open to
his sight. Sometimes a person does something we do not understand, or says something stupid or clumsy, but his intention was
quite different – God knows what was in the heart; he hears what
remains unspoken.
It may seem frightening to be penetrated by the clear light of
God’s gaze. But we ought never to forget that even in judgment
God sees us with eyes of love. When God sees his creatures, he affirms them and encourages them. His love is redemptive; it is the
power that enables us to become our true selves. He sees the evil in
a person so clearly and sharply, it is as if he had no love for him; at
the same time he hopes so strongly for that person, it is as if he saw
no evil in him. Even his harshest words of condemnation are spoken
with the most tender love. That is why we can do nothing better
than to place ourselves willingly under his light and say, “God, see
me as I am, and see me for what I long to be.”
Augustine says that when a carpenter walks through the woods,
he does not see the trees as they stand there in the forest, but as
the beams of the house they will be made into. So God has joy in
us, not as we are now but what we can be. As Archbishop Desmond
Tutu puts it: “God does not look at the caterpillar we are now but
at the dazzling butterfly we have it in us to become.” We must ask
for eyes to see each other with the same hope and love.
When Laura married Basil,
their wedding brought tremendous
joy to all of us who knew them. Yet soon after they had a child,
Basil left her, and now Laura is raising her son without a father.
Laura loves her husband and remains faithful to him. There seems
little chance of these two ever coming together again, but Laura
believes God sees her need, and who can debate that? Prayer opens
doors.
Even though my husband is unfaithful, I often feel very close to
him through prayer. Strange as it may seem, I even feel what a
gift it is to be able to carry him inwardly in this way, and place
our marriage in God’s hands.
I don’t know what will happen at all, but if he returns I will
look back on this time as foundational – a gift to learn that pain
is real, to live in prayer, and to experience that God comes close
to us when we are in pain.
I often remember what someone once said to me about being close to God in suffering. It’s a whole dimension of a full life
to have awful outward conditions and totally, in spite of it, to
experience a deeper fulfillment than ever.
For me, prayer is like the fourth dimension or the sixth sense,
and life is only half there without it. Prayer is like a whole, real,
other side of life that gives all relationships meaning, because
with prayer you can suffer with other people’s suffering, even if
you can’t do anything about it.
Generations of children
have loved the story of Jonah, who was
sent by God to call the people of Nineveh to repentance, but disobeyed and boarded a ship in a cowardly and foolish effort to escape his notice. A mighty storm came, and the ship was almost lost.
But as the desperate crew threw the cargo overboard and prayed
to their gods, Jonah lay fast asleep. He was wakened by the captain, and the sailors drew lots to see whose fault it was that such a
calamity had come upon them. The lot fell to Jonah. He confessed
that he was running away from God and had them throw him
overboard. Immediately the sea ceased its raging, but Jonah was
swallowed by a whale. Three days later he was thrown up on dry
land. This time, obedient to God, he struck out for Nineveh.
While in the belly of the whale, Jonah prayed:
In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From the
depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry.
You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and
the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers
swept over me. I said, “I have been banished from your sight; yet
I will look again toward your holy temple.” The engulfing waters
threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped
around my head. To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the
earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up
from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was ebbing away, I
remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy
temple. Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that
could be theirs. But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice
to you. What I have vowed I will make good. For my deliverance
comes from God alone.
It would seem that Jonah was not the strongest of characters, yet
God chose to use him and show us how he tries to draw us to himself in so many ways: through sharpness, through compassion,
through mercy. He deals with us much as a loving parent would
deal with wayward children.
My father Heinrich, a pastor for many decades, counseled many
distressed souls over the years he served our church. At the same
time, he himself suffered much, both physically and inwardly, but
he was never downcast about it. Rather, he said he believed we do
good only insofar as we are willing to go the way of Jesus, “from
the manger to the cross.” He even spoke of “embracing” the cross.
For him this meant accepting suffering in whatever form it came,
and accepting it gladly. In a letter he once wrote: