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A forgotten life is no reflection of God
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"My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me. Hark, the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land: 'Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?' " Jeremiah 8.18
If there is anything we learn in our time here on earth it is that life can be as difficult as it is beautiful.
We learn that there exist many crosses of various sizes, some heavier than others, and any one or more of them could be -- will be -- ours. But there is one cross that is certainly among the heaviest of all -- the belief that we are forgotten.
Anyone who works or cares for the homebound or those in nursing homes can tell you this is true.
I learned it from experience.
I learned it again recently from a friend -- aged, alone, infirm, fearful, lonely and a beautiful child of God.
On a particularly bad day she called to talk and her words will never leave my heart: "This is not living," she said. "And if it is, I would rather die."
She was living a forgotten life - an oxymoron to be sure, and one that was acutely empty and painful. For her, as for anyone who suffers from such loneliness, the pain is made worse, not simply by the absence of human love but more so by what that represents.
When we have been forgotten by family and friends alike it is not hard to believe that God has forgotten us too.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote powerfully of that experience: "There is no human misery more strongly felt than the state of being forsaken by God. Nothing is so terrible as rejection by Him. It is a horror to live deserted by God and effaced from His mind." His words bring to mind the pleading, pain-filled words of Christ as he hung dying on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
How often have we felt the need to speak the same words? How often and how deeply does the wound of loneliness rupture our hearts? In these moments of pain it is easy to believe that God has lost sight of what we believe to be our insignificant lives, but Heschel would not agree.
This deeply spiritual and prayerful man of God wrote of "Divine pathos," the grief and suffering of God with God's children and God's creation when they are in pain. Anyone who has ever loved knows that this kind of suffering can only flow from love, for without love there can be no grief. The deeper the love, the more profound the grief.
It is comforting to believe that God knows our pain, feels our pain and holds our hearts and souls in the passionate embrace of divine love. It is from such an embrace that we are able to renew our strength and overcome our loneliness, if only long enough to be God "with flesh on" for people like my dear, lonely friend.
Even in the midst of our own pain, and sometimes because of it, we are all called to put God's love into life.
How well we do that is up to us, but "forgotten" should never be the last feeling to fill anyone's heart
____________________________________
Mary Morrell, the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers and mother of six sonx, is also a Hospice volunteer through Haven Hospice, JFK Hospital, Edison, New Jersey and writer for Real Faith TV, produced by the Diocese of Trenton.
Contact
Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org
NJ, US
Mary Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562-1990
mmorrell@diometuchen.org
Keywords
God
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