I wonder what is going through the minds of the thousand of people recently visited by the calamity brought in by Hurricane Helene, and now Hurricane Milton.
What is going through and what are feeling the Taylor’s, the Roukous’ who lost family members, and the families of Chief Chad Satcher, and 18-year-old Landon Bodie, two firefighters who died when a tree fell over them while on the way to save other people’s lives?
And what about the thousands left only with what they were wearing and just their memories? What about those whose homesteads were erased from the face of the Earth by the force of the sea, winds, or the mountain rivers?
What may be going on through the minds of thousands of innocent lives lost during the present war in the Holy Land? Holy Land?????
Were all they victims so evil that deserved such calamity? Yeah, of course there will be some that Bible in hand will say that because their great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor once missed church, now two hundred years later they are getting their payback. Really?
Or, indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone would have told them, “Curse God and die”, as poor Job was told by his “friends.”
For if we go back to the wee days of human history, Job’s story is not much different to what the people of Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Holy Land experienced.
Where is God in my circumstances? Ahead, back, on my right or left? Where is God asked Job? And where is God when – saving the distances – things do not stop piling up on my life?
Let me go back not too far back in time, but just two thousand years ago. It is early Good Friday.
After a supper that eventually turned into a sad farewell event, Jesus was betrayed in front of his friends. He was dragged through the kangaroo court, being accused out of envy, suspicion, and fake news, beaten, crowned with thorns, bullied to carry the instrument of his own death, and eventually nailed onto the Cross?
And a voice could be heard,
“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? I am crying, and yet you do not answer?”
Those were the words from a Jesus who claimed that He and His Father were One. The same Jesus who insisted that whatever He was preaching and doing was nothing more than what his Father has told him to say and do.
But now Jesus finds himself, all by himself, being truly left behind by disciples and friends, and even his own Father is nowhere to be seen. And so, Jesus is left alone to hang in the Cross, all by himself.
Like Job and countless more generation after generation Jesus was asking, “Where is God in my circumstances? Ahead, back, on my right or left? Where is God?” In contemporary speech, “Has God gone ‘dark?’”
Let me tell you this story about Mother Teresa.
“One of Mother Teresa’s deepest fears after she founded the Missionaries of Charity was that she or one of her sisters and brothers would do or say something to cause scandal or detract from the Order’s mission.
“Yet Teresa did cause scandal, although only after she’d been dead for a decade, and then only for a short time. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a book that collected many of her most personal and private correspondence, was published.
Teresa's letters “revealed that, except for one short period, Teresa had been afflicted with a deep sense of God’s absence for the last half-century of her life.
“On hearing the news, many Christians were confused. What did Teresa’s long stay in the spiritual wilderness mean? Was she a victim of depression? Had she lost faith in God? What gave her the inner strength to carry on even when she anguished over what she felt to be God’s abandonment of her?
“Then, some of her sisters remembered her warning. Four years before she died, Mother Teresa warned her sisters that ‘the Devil’ is continuously on the prowl in order to ‘make you feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves you.’” (Kerry Walters, Mother Teresa: A Saint Who Conquered Darkness)
And, so, even without saying it publicly, through her commitment and actions Mother Teresa still said loud and clear, “Never mind what I am going through, how I feel or even what I believe. For even if God has gone dark, yet I know that my Redeemer lives and at the end of my days I will see his face.”
Which is what Jesus did. While alone in the Cross, the only one who spoke to him was a criminal who sympathized with Jesus in his plight.
And Jesus, who could have said a few choice words, nevertheless continued to preach the good news of God’s unquenchable love, even in the darkest of the darkest circumstances. Even when God appeared nowhere, and when everything pointed to the absence of a God, let alone a loving God, Jesus promised Paradise with him in the world to come.
I don’t know what the author of Hebrews was thinking when he wrote, “Jesus understands every weakness of ours, because he was tried in every way that we are.”
In other words, let me suggest that the authors is telling us is that whenever the heaven’s doors seem firmly closed, when all the red lines have been busted, when the limits of our endurance have been left behind, yet, still, don’t give up on a God who will never, ever, give up on you.
No. It is not a matter of shrugging it off or adopting a stiff upper lip. The bottom line of faith is realizing that even in the darkest pit, God still is present and if anything, God understands what we are going through because he went through the same dark valley of the soul. And, as the author of Hebrews writes, “But Jesus did not fail.”
No. There is not much that one can say to anyone who is going through the dark valleys of the soul.
And perhaps it is best to say nothing, lest we turn ourselves into the same kind of “friends” that were those who approached Job in his time of need.
However, let’s recall about another time when God was nowhere to be seen or heard. It was the time before Creation, where nothing that exists today was there, “darkness was everywhere.”
Humanly speaking, there is no reason “why” the universe exists. Yes, scientist explore how the universe came into being. But no one, even within and beyond the scientific or philosophical reasoning can explain “Why?” And that’s fine, for the job of science and philosophy is to tell us how and when, not why.
It is in the realm of faith where we find the “Why?”, for we believe that the universe exists out of God’s love. Love motivated God to bring light out of darkness, to create order out of chaos and, ultimately, to bring hope and meaning out of despair and randomness.
So, whenever God appears to go dark, when calamity visits lives, when one appears to be truly left behind, let us recall that out of that primordial darkness, God’s love still came triumphant. Love not as a kind of “Hallmark movie” love, but love incarnate in Jesus Christ.
When the storms of life rage, when the world pushes people against the corner, when light and hope grow dim, God never runs out of love. Impossible? Yes. But as the gospel tells us, “For God everything is possible”. Mind you, God never said that for Him nothing is impossible but, rather, that for God, everything is possible. Nothing is off the board.
This is why Job, Jesus, Mother Teresa, and countless others not only survived but eventually thrived during their dark nights of the soul. They realized that as the author of Hebrews would tell us, “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” (11:1).
Faith not in ourselves, in the power of our resourcefulness or our resiliency, but in God’s unquenchable and overreaching love and in the assurance that there are no forces in heaven or under heaven that can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus – even when the circumstances tell us that this is what indeed is going on.
Let me tell you the good news using the George Matheson’s beloved hymn, “O Love that will not let me go”,
O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee.
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.
Fr. Gustavo
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