“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief.”
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Perhaps it would be helpful to look at it from God’s point of view. Take this for example. The other day I was driving with my five-month-old son in the back seat crying, screaming at the top of his lungs. He wasn’t hungry, dirty, or sleepy. He just wanted to be comforted, to feel his father’s presence.
I tried talking to him, singing to him, anything to let him know that I was with him even though he couldn’t see me. No matter what I did, he wouldn’t stop crying. Finally, we arrived at our destination, I jumped out, opened the back door, unbuckled him from his car seat, and held him in my arms. The crying ceased immediately as he felt the warmth of his father’s arms around him. He was no longer alone.
Then to my dismay as I walked into the shopping center with my baby boy strapped to my chest I realized how quickly he had forgotten about me as his eyes looked around in amazement at all the lights and people swirling around him. He had finally got what he had been crying out for, and once he had it, he had lost interest in an instant—the distractions were too great.
He Hasn’t Left, We Have Stopped Looking
Many times in our lives we cry out to God in prayer asking to hear Him, see Him, feel Him, or at least to be able to perceive His presence, to know that He is with us. We feel alone, abandoned, like my scared baby boy in the dark, loneliness of the back seat. We need Him and He’s not there!
I think God allows us to feel this detachment, this spiritual dryness, this separation from Him, in order that we can learn not to take for granted the closeness and intimacy that He offers us day-by-day. We beg and plead, sometimes bringing ourselves to tears because we can’t find God amidst the busy, noisiness of our modern world.
Then when He reveals Himself to us in prayer or whatever other means, we feel comforted. We feel at peace. We feel loved again. But within days, minutes, or even seconds we are distracted once again by our busy, noisy world. Like the little boy strapped to my chest we are so distracted by what’s going on around us that we forget how intimately close we are to our Father. He is with us always in every place and in every situation. He holds us in His arms. He whispers tenderly into our ears telling us How much He loves us, but we can’t hear Him. There are too many distractions.
You Can’t Avoid the Desert
The Church recognizes that “the world” is one of our biggest spiritual enemies, one of the biggest, shiniest “idols” standing between us and our God of love. It is for this reason that we are called to the desert. This is the reason that the Church in her wisdom challenges us to embark on the lenten journey each year.
The desert is dry, barren, lonely, void of life, yet serenely peaceful allowing for interior reflection, silent prayer, and deep communion with God. It is to the desert that Jesus was sent after His baptism. He was being tested, prepared, formed. Our baptismal vows to reject sin, the glamorization of evil, and the devil seem so profoundly simple, yet our world seems to draw us into sin, to tempt us by making evil and everything that is bad for us look so good. Our world seems to be on the side of the devil, the father of lies. Our world has come to believe his lies, to promote them, and encourage us to do the same.
That’s why we need the desert. We need to be reminded of this. We need to be reconciled to God. As we return to prayer which often we have put on the back burner, we return to God, broken and fragile. As we fast and abstain—not only from food, not only on Fridays—we learn to deny ourselves, we learn the self-control necessary to resist the constant bombardment of temptations, to “turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.” And in our almsgiving, our service to others, we set aside our own desires in order to serve the needs of others, to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Until you’ve been through the desert, you can’t appreciate the richness of the oasis.