I am in the process of reading “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope” by Joan Chittister. In chapter 8 writing about “When Life is Interrupted”, I found her thoughts particularly relevant and helpful. Perhaps you will also.
When life is interrupted
The great interruptions of life leave us completely disoriented. We become lost. The map of life changes overnight and our sense of direction and purpose goes with it. Life comes to a halt, takes on a new and indiscernible shape. Promise fails us and it is the loss of promise that dries in our throats. What was is no more and what is to come, if anything, is unclear. All the things we depended on to keep us safe, to show us the way, to give us a reason for going on, disappear.
I understand only two things in my helpless rage: that there must be enemies somewhere and that they have managed to destroy me though see them I can’t and know them I don’t.
I am left plunged in black loneliness, the life behind me a little thinner now, the life before me a little less welcoming. Through it all, I find myself blindfolded and spinning somewhere in an inner space I have never known before.
We find ourselves on a wet, grey slope of sliding clay, being towed under, being swallowed up and taken down, no towline to save us. Who has not known this helpless, sinking feeling? Who has not known the God of Absence? Who has not felt abandoned by God?
It is the moment of personal crucifixion in which we finally say out loud what we most fear: that there is no God, at least not here, not now. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” becomes a personal cry. In the depths of pain, we suddenly find that this universe is, at base, a gross and teasing thing, purposeless, unguided, unwanted, uncared for. We doubt the God of losses. We doubt the notion of any God at all. We certainly doubt that God has anything real to do with us. If there is a God, it is a God who laughs at butterflies impaled on a board.
Sure of the absence of God, we actually become aware of the presence of God. It is the paradox of faith. It is the fortunate misadventure of life. By losing everything, we come to the realization that everything is far less than we think it is and far more than we ever dreamed it could be. In the end, everything is what cannot be taken away, what cannot be lost, what will not fail us in our hope. Everything is the nagging awareness that always there is more and that I already have it. I am reduced by misery to stop and look through the darkness to the light on the horizon that never changes.
Struggle is what forces us to attend to the greater things in life, to begin again when life is at its barest for us, to take the seeds of the past and give them new growth.
We fear darkness and we avoid it. Nothing chills the soul more than lightlessness. It threatens our confidence. It jeopardizes our sense of self-sufficiency. To be in new space, to be where we do not know the contours of the place, cannot see the exit sign, cannot control the environment shakes us to our roots. We become pawns in the hands of the great unknown. And then, just then, we begin to believe in God in a whole new way. Darkness is the call to faith.