On dealing with abandonment

“You have caused my friends to abandon me; you have made me repulsive to them. I am closed in and cannot escape.”  (Ps. 88:8)

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Many of us will feel a sense of abandonment at some time during our lives. Words which are synonymous reveal the dreadfulness of this experience: betrayal, neglect, rejection, desertion, discarded. “Abandonment” is etymologically connected to “ban” (to prohibit or prevent). It seems that at every turn we are stopped or obstructed. All of a sudden, the lights are out. The rooms are dark, both literally and metaphorically. Abandonment can soon lead to the abject feeling of hopelessness. When we feel abandoned, disconnected, it is only natural to retreat. With retreat comes the inevitable isolation. We separate from people and things we love. We feel worthless. Left behind and cut off. Melancholia, as if quicksand, begins to draw us deeper into this place of inconsolable desolation. “I am unlovable”, we tell ourselves. This will only compound the agony of feeling utterly alone. Identity and personality are deconstructed, where it would seem to the one suffering that putting all of the ‘blocks’ back again, would be all, but impossible. And it is here, inside of this compressing horror, at its most brutal, and dangerous, that we have lost many people, including a large number of our young. This is what it can feel like, we are told. This “fear of emptiness” from which both the body and the mind plead for rescue and delivery.

“Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly” (Ps. 31:9)

Who will listen to the cries of the suffering soul? Who can understand the desperation of a weeping heart? Who will pick up the phone at 4.00AM in the morning? “O, brother, where art thou?”  the spirit cries out. “I am here. Wait another day. All will be well.” Is it your own voice or that of the Creator? For now, it doesn’t matter. Do not concern yourself with this right now. Discernment will arrive in its own time. All that matters, even if it might seem you are all alone in the world, all that matters, is that I am here with you. I surround you. Even in your darkness, I surround you. Get through this, the storm cannot last forever, and another layer of your true name will be shown to you. This desolateness is my point of entry. All of these dreads you have been voicing to yourself are not true. There is a reality to them, yes, a substantiality, but they are not the final truth of who you are. Like your tears, the pain is very real, and yet much of the narrative belongs to your imagination. Do not allow for your phantasms to take over. Look beyond the exaggerations. You are much bigger than the walls you have built around yourself.

“Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.” (Rumi)

The most meaningful and enduring accomplishments have been born from within this darkness, when a bright light spills out of the endurance. Do not lose sight of this truth for others have been there before you. Christ was abandoned in Gethsemane by those closest to him and it is there he consents to save the world. King David penned his most propitious psalms when his sense of abandonment threatened to consume him whole. Saint John of the Cross wrote the greater part of the Spiritual Canticle locked away in a cell, abandoned and tormented by his brethren. It was in exile where the famed Persian poets, abandoned by their homeland and families, laid down a large deposit of their mystical splendour. Orphans which have been abandoned, some left on the streets of inhospitable cities, have grown to become benevolent souls of profound succour. The list is long because such suffering is not uncommon. Most of these conquerors have been anonymous. This too, you must take hold off and be strengthened, knowing that they were made of the very same stuff as you. 

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” (Kahlil Gibran)

In abandonment, if you can, love, even all the more. It is not impossible. It is there, in this self-surrender, in the places of your vulnerability, which is your truth, where the conquering is to be found. Little by little, one step at a time, hour by hour and day by day, draw back the curtains allow for the light to seep into your rooms. Into the wounds of your heart. Don’t give up yet, not now, when you are about to grow stronger. Persevere a little while longer in this trial. In this hour your cup is on the brink of overspilling with an incorruptible treasure. “Grace works best in the worst of conditions”, it has been said. Transformation, like Light, is also known by its baptisms of fire.

When you need a warm hug or a trusted ear, and there comes a time when we all do, reach out to someone you know, a soul which will not turn their back on you. There is always someone. And this too, which you are passing through now, my dearest A., like all things, it will pass.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jer. 29:11)

Sorrow Comes to All

“Christ offers us, not a way round suffering, but a way through it; not a substitution, but saving companionship.” (Kallistos Ware)

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Where is God during these times? Where is He when bad things happen to good people? How do the words of a preacher help or heal those who have lost their homes, who have lost their families, those who are alone in prison, or in a hospital dying of cancer? The mother whose child is dying in her arms because it is sick or hungry? “Where is God?” ask the poor and the abandoned. “Where is He now?” asks the young person about to put an end to his or her life. The words of no individual, however great, cannot ever eliminate the pain nor explain away the suffering. We would be deluded to think that our words, even though genuine and caring, could wipe away the multitude of tears. And yet, by pointing to divine revelation, that is, witnessing to Scripture and to the “Word” (the eternal LOGOS who was from the “beginning” Jn. 1:1), a sorrowful heart can be shown that there is, indeed, a way through the suffering. However desperate and improbable our situation, always there is hope for we have been “begotten” to a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1Pet. 1:3). God is there, sharing in our common humanity, “taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7), experiencing our pain, empathizing with our humiliation, feeling our rejection, suffering with us in a meaningful and enduring way. He does understand our grief and reveals to us the way through our sorrow.

In His human nature, before His terrible crucifixion, the GodMan prays, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). He is there in every hospital and prison and orphanage and broken home and mourning heart. “I was naked and you clothed Me” (Matt. 25:36). The Father was there at Calvary when His only begotten Son cried unto Him, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46) There will come a day, Scripture tells us, a specific moment in history when all sorrow and all suffering will come to an end, “[a]nd God will wipe away every tear... there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying... no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4). God promises, that similarly to Jesus, our pain will be redeemed and a higher understanding will come to us for “now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1Cor. 13:12). This does not lessen the brutality of our toughest battles, but it does mean our tears and suffering are not to be looked upon as ‘wastelands’. These experiences of sorrow ("feelings of deep distress") are not only commonplace in our lives, but often they are the only authentic way of communicating with each other. Real pain, unlike feigned pleasure, cannot be easily counterfeited. Fairy-tales and myths, from the earliest of years when the believing community was persecuted and torn asunder, had nothing to do with a faith ‘blind’ to the outside reality -but it was a belief tested and realized in the world and established in blood.

What may presently be inexplicable, will be made clear to us on that last day to which we do "not know what hour" (Matt. 24:42). We will see that our path, strewn with both joy and heartache, was our unique way through life and that it could not have been any different; in some tangible sense our spiritual DNA. And that He, our Lord, was there with us in ways that we could not ever have possibly imagined. That He was there during those times when sorrow might appear to be robbing us of breath and even of life itself- as the penitent thief himself discovered on Golgotha Hill when he asked the Lord to remember him in His kingdom, “[a]ssuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).

Sorrow does not discriminate and it cares little for our religious convictions or philosophies. We all have to find a way through our suffering and to make sense of it. Our profoundest thinkers have encouraged us to not fight the provenance of our pain but to ask the meaningful question: What does this suffering mean for me and how can I use it? There is an assumption of reason here, that we are not dealing with “accident”. The Universe itself we are discovering is not without cause or order. If gravity is just slightly moved, then there is nothing. Physicists and cosmologists are all the more speaking of “fine-tuning” and moving away from theories of random behaviour. We, too, are the stuff of stardust. Let us at least, if we are not able to do anything else, bring comfort to those who are in deep distress. This alone might be one of our great successes as human beings.

“Dear Father, I still do not understand and I suffer at the awful horrors and unimaginable pain about me. How are these dreadful and abysmal things possible when every good thing has proceeded forth from Eternal Love? I weep at the impossibility for wherever I turn, I come back to you, and to you Alone. Yes, my Lord, if there is any small goodness within me, it is on account of my suffering, and if we have performed any good deed, that too, is on account of our suffering that we might learn something of compassion.”