“My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”  Mark 15:34

“Love Winter, when the Plant says Nothing.”  Thomas Merton

“I Am With You Always” Matthew 28:20

When in your life were you closest to God? 

When in your life was God closest to you?

The answers to those two questions may very well be the same.  Yet you may not see it as such.

We are tempted to believe we are closest to God when things are going well in our lives.  When we have an especially “heavenly” moment.  When we feel, or perhaps even see, the presence of God so obviously. Or perhaps we think we are closest to God when we are doing “God’s work”, whatever that may mean.  Ironically it is precisely at those times when we may in truth be the farthest from God.  And, paradoxically, it may very well be the times we are closest to God are those times when we feel most distant, separated or secluded.  It is precisely then that God is closest to us, doing His best work in us. 

The life of Jesus appears to be proof of that.  It is when He was seemingly utterly forsaken by The Father, when all was suffering and silence, that God was closest, and doing God’s best work not only for Jesus but for the World.  Without death there is no resurrection.

Jesus’s last words recorded in the Gospel of Matthew are a promise of God’s abiding presence.  But immediately after speaking them Jesus disappears from sight.  Was this a cruel joke?  Or was this proof of the principal that in order for God to be closest, He must appear to be distant?

Those who followed the path of Jesus “got” this.  It’s why they followed Him into the desert.  The early mystics sought God in the places that God was least likely to be found.  Consider the following from Celtic Daily Prayer.

            “The more one advances in the Christian Faith, the more they live the presence of God as an absence, the more they accept to die to the idea of becoming aware of God, of fathoming Him. For they have learned while advancing that God is unfathomable.  And from then on the presence of God assumes value in their eyes only against the backdrop of absence.  The mystic, in his (or hers) long and complicated pilgrimage, experiences alternately the presence and absence of God.  But by degrees the absence of God is felt more and more, and the mystic understands that the absence is now the norm. Thus the mystic is someone who has had a long-term confrontation with God, like Jacob in the struggle he waged all through the night, someone who does not cease to confront God.  God always precedes us, yet we see Him only from behind.  What the mystic experiences—and every Christian is a mystic because it is not the great illuminations that are the mark of the mystic but the night, an everyday night—is a kind of distancing from God in proportion to advances in the deepening of their faith.”

So what is this saying about your life?  Do you feel distant from God right now?  If so, don’t despair.  Perhaps this is a very necessary and good place to be.  It may very well be that God is closer than you could imagine.  On the other hand, if you are feeling especially close to God, perhaps the desire needs to be a night spent wrestling with God, or an intentional walking into the wilderness of the desert, there to be led for forty days and nights with the cloud and fire in which one encounters God’s desire.

In order to bloom the flower of faith must lie dormant and seemingly dead in the cold winter that sometimes covers one soul.