I have often been told that when one first turns to God,
one is greeted with brilliant Yes answers to prayers. For a long time, this was true for me. But then, when God has you hooked, God starts
to say No. But it has been more than a
No answer lately; after all, No it is an answer. It is the silence, the withdrawal that is so devastating.
Madeleine
L’Engle (The Irrational Season, p. 173)
In a world full of jive
Full of homicide and suicide
There's no room for love and romance
In a world full of spite
Full of hatefulness and bitterness
Sincerity don't stand a chance
And every night I close my eyes
And ask the stars above
Oh where, oh where, oh where, oh where is love?
Lyrics by
Jay Davies, sung by the Kinks
________________________________
I love “yes”
Do you love me?
Yes!
Is it time for dinner?
Yes!
I love it when all things work together for God
When life is full of Sacred yeses
When the sanctuary is full
When my relationships are working
When I am affirmed for what I do
When I am valued for who I am
God is full of “Yes”
Every sunrise and sunset is a “yes”
Every smile, every laugh!
Every “thank you”
The joy on an old woman’s face when I show up to visit, perhaps
her first visitor in a week, is a “yes”
I love it when it feels like Sacred is saying “yes”
But there are so many moments of “No”
I am never quite sure if they are really “No”
Or merely “not yet”
Or even a “redirect”
I am not sure if certain moments are God’s “no” or
Simply the “no” of human creatures getting in the way of
God’s “yes”
But there are truly times
When the deepest yearnings of my heart
Go unfulfilled
And times when it seems, I am not allowed to escape the
pain and loss
Times when I cannot avoid or deflect.
There are other times when God simply seems silent
When prayer feels, literally, like praying to a stone
wall.
Even Jesus had such moments
In Gethsemane
He asked God to “take this cup from me”
The answer was “no”
On the cross, God seemed silent!
“My God, My God why have you forsaken me!”
But out of God’s “no” to Jesus, came a great “yes”
The resurrection
And past the silence was a grand reunion of parent and
child
The joyful dance of the Trinity united
How often I have found that I needed the “no” to get to
the “yes”
And how often I have found that God’s silence is not
merely silence
But simply the still small voice of the Sacred
The whispers of the divine, being drowned out by the
noise of the world
There are times I do not understand
When the “no” seems simply like “no”
When my father died of cancer, young,
When my mother died of a variant of ALS, young
When all my prayers for them went unanswered
I still do not understand why two such wonderful and
precious souls
Should have had their lives shortened in that way
While people I see as truly evil seem to go on forever
Sometimes God seems truly absent
And I wonder, as fascists thrive and hate proliferates
As the world burns
And justice is denied
Where God is in all of this?
I am not one of those who can simply say
“Someday I’ll understand”
I have questions.
I want answers
I struggle with trust
But life goes on
And history unfolds
And I am left, as was Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
Moses and David
And Jesus
Crying into the heated air
“Oh God, into your hands I commend my spirit”
Left only with a frail trust
in an eternal “yes”
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