The Presence and Absence of God

By Pastor Bruce

In 2007, the personal letters of Mother Teresa to the priest that was her spiritual confidant were published ten years after her death. She had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was admired the world over for her “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor” (the fourth vow of the order she founded). As people read these letters, they were surprised to see that inwardly she often experienced the absence of God more than his presence. She wrote, “The silence and the emptiness are so great. I look and do not see, listen and do not hear, the tongue moves in prayer, but I do not speak…” The pain of feeling this absence from God and feeling God’s distance from her only caused her to feel more deeply the acute pain of the hunger, disease, and misery of those she served.

People assumed that anyone who had given themselves so thoroughly to the sick, the dying, beggars and street children would experience the graces of God’s presence in abundance and were shocked to read of God’s silence in her life. Some called her a fraud.

But anyone familiar with the history of spirituality will know that going back to the Hebrew Psalms, the absence of God is often felt most keenly by the saints. In Psalm 13, David wrote:

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?

    How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

    and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

After teaching at Yale and Harvard, Henri Nouwen left the academic world to join the L’Arche Community in Toronto where he took on the care of Adam, a profoundly disabled adult who required assistance each hour of the day. He testified that, "It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship." Ironically, this sacrificial choice coincided with a period of his life when he felt the absence of God more than ever before. And so his experience was not much different than that of Mother Teresa.

Nouwen offers us the wisdom gleaned from those lean years:

Is God present or is he absent? Maybe we can say that in the center of our sadness over his absence we can find the first signs of his presence. And that in the middle of our longings for God we discover the footprints of the one who has created those longings. It is in this faithful waiting for the loved one that we learn how much he has filled our lives already. Just as a mother’s love for her son can grow while she waits to be reunited with him, so also our intimate friendship with God can become deeper while we wait expectantly for his resurrection.

And this:

God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart. I do believe that he touches me in places that are unknown even to myself. I seldom can point directly to these places; but when I feel his inner pull to return again to that hidden hour of prayer, I realize that something is happening that is so deep that it becomes like the riverbed through which the waters can safely flow and find their way to the open sea.

Have you felt the absence of God more than his presence? Have these feelings come on the occasions that you anticipated you would receive the graces of his presence most abundantly? Has this only intensified your yearning for God as the writer of Psalm 42 expressed it?

As the deer pants for streams of water,
    so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
    When can I go and meet with God?

Has it aroused in your heart only a deeper love for your Lord? Can you relate to these words by Richard Rolle?

I ask you, Lord Jesus,

to develop in me, your lover,

an immeasurable urge towards you,

an affection that is unbounded,

fervor that throws discretion to the winds!

The more worthwhile our love for you,

all the more pressing does it become.

Reason cannot hold it in check,

fear does not make it tremble,

wise judgment does not temper it.

Will you join Peter Marshall in this prayer?

Our Father, sometimes you seem so far away, as if you are a God in hiding, as if you are determined to elude all who seek you. Yet we know that you are far more willing to be found than we are willing to seek you. And you have promised, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” And have you not assured us that you are with us always?

Help us now to be as aware of your nearness as we are of the physical realities of everyday life. Help us to recognize your voice with as much assurance as we recognize the sounds of the world around us. We would find you now in the privacy of our own hearts, in the quiet of this moment. We would know, our Father, that you are near us and beside us, that you love us, that you are interested in all we do and that you are concerned about all of our affairs.

May we become more aware of your companionship, of him who walks beside us. At times when we feel forsaken, may we know the presence of the Holy Spirit who brings comfort to all our hearts. May we be convinced that even before we reach up to you, you are already reaching down to us.