Year C – Sixth Sunday of Easter

Have you ever felt that Jesus was absent in your life? Have you ever felt that God was far away?

Sometime back I was talking to a young friend of mine about this subject. She simply feels that Jesus is absent in her life right now. I suggested to her to write a letter to Jesus. So she decided to write an email to Jesus, copied to me. With her kind permission I share this with you. She writes:

Jesus,

Well….this is not a break up….but I wanted to tell you that I realize that I don’t love you [any more]. Don’t get me wrong. I adore your teaching, I love your spirituality. And that is what you are to me—a guru, a teacher, someone to look up to and admire. I admire my doctor for the wonderful way he worked on my mangled foot, but i don’t love him. (JD is referring to an accident that she suffered recently.) And as I thought about all this the other night, I realized that I don’t love you either.

I think I know what is love – I have shared it with close friends and with mom. I know the feeling. I don’t feel that feeling for you. You seem like my teachers in college, there is a relation but [it is distant and aloof]. I respect you, but I don’t understand you. I feel that all I know about you is from the written pages of the Bible. You’re the protagonist of the story. I want to know you on a one-on-one basis, but that just does not seem possible. I want to write my [own] bible, just as Matthew and Luke and John wrote theirs. Their narration is their experience of you. When will i have mine?

Where are you, when I long for your presence and want to hear a word from you? When I long for the warmth of your hug and wish you would wrap me in your embrace, where are you? I cry for you and all I feel is the cold air around me. You seem absent. You seem far away. Do you just love to see my loneliness? I would like to have you as my best friend and talk to you, but what I have are just one-sided conversations. I feel like a lunatic. Why can’t you speak? Don’t tell me you speak through the Bible. Keep that for the scholars. Why don’t you speak to me directly, as a friend would? Am I asking too much? Well, for someone who claims to love me, this demand is but normal. Jesus, this is so frustrating!! — JD.

We are fast moving towards the end of the Eastertide. Next Sunday will be the feast of Ascension. The liturgy of the word is preparing us for the farewell of Jesus. The gospel text for this Sunday comes from the farewell discourse of Jesus after the last supper (John 14:23-29). Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me say: I am going away and shall return.” Though the going away of Jesus is a preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit, the absence of Jesus could be agonizing. We might all go through moments of absence of God/Jesus, just as my friend JD is going through these days. Against the backdrop of the farewell speech of Jesus in the gospel of today, I would like to invite you to reflect on the feeling of the absence of God in our lives, and how we might handle these situations.

The feeling of the absence of God, and the anguish of the soul seeking God, is so powerfully expressed in the Old Testament. Prophet Isaiah (45:15) cries out, “O God of Israel, the Savior, you are a God who lies hidden.” And the Psalmist (27:7-8) prays, “It is your face, Oh Lord, that I seek hide not your face from me.”

While Jesus was hanging on the cross, he himself goes through those sentiments of being abandoned by God, as he prays Psalm 22: “Oh God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And the psalm continues: “The words of my groaning do nothing to save me. My God, I call by day but you do not answer, at night, but I find no respite.”

Now, these sentiments could be expressions of frustrations of our prayers not being answered, but often they are portrayals of the earnest longing of the soul to be united with God. And God seems so far away.

St John of the Cross, a Carmelite mystic who lived in the 16th century in Spain, is known for his mystical poems. His famous “Spiritual Canticle” (written in 1678) opens with these lines:

Where have you hidden Yourself,
And abandoned me to my sorrow, O my Beloved!
You have fled like the hart,
Having wounded me.
I ran after you, crying; but you were gone.

More recently, Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta seemed to have gone through this feeling of the absence of God for nearly 50 years of her life. Her letters and journal entries, published as a book entitled, Come Be My Light, express a darkness that Mother Teresa had to go through even as she was being the sign of the love of God for many people. In one undated entry she writes:

Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The Child of your Love – and now become as the most hated one – the one – You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on Whom I can cling – no, No One. – Alone … Where is my Faith – even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness – My God – how painful is this unknown pain – I have no Faith – I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart & make me suffer untold agony.

It was not my intention to create a negative mood this morning. But these are genuine human sentiments and we need to face them. On the other hand, just as it is said that, absence makes the heart grow fonder, our own experience of the absence of God/Jesus could mark the beginning of a deeper spiritual journey.

Therefore, to JD – my young friend, I want to point out that we all go through these moments. When I go through these moments of the absence of God in Jesus, I try to ask myself the following questions:

(1) Am I looking for Jesus in the right place? In Mt 2: the Magi went looking for Jesus – the king who was born, in the palace of Herod. Human logic. They preferred to follow human logic rather than that ‘irrational’ star in the sky. Logic failed them. When the women went to the tomb on the Sunday morning after the Sabbath, the angels told them: why seek the living among the dead? Simple logic: that is where they had seen him last on the Friday evening. But Jesus was not there! Even in my life, perhaps Jesus is not there now, where I met him last. So…

(2) Am I ready to be surprised by him? In the gospel today, Jesus says, I am going away so that the Holy Spirit could come. And he “will teach you everything” (Jn 14:26) While speaking to Nicodemus earlier in the Gospel of John (3:7-8), Jesus invites him to give the Holy Spirit his space: “The wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

(3) Therefore, am I humble enough to accept that praying is my effort but what will happen during prayer is the Grace of God?

From my own little experience, I can only say that these moments of emptiness, darkness, questioning are very fecund moments. It is like the seed waiting under the soil for its opportune moment to sprout. It is like the night before creation. It is like the nine months of being in the womb – there is a lot of work in progress. So I want to prayerfully assure my friend, JD: Wait for the birth. Wait for the arrival of the New Jerusalem (see the 2nd reading of today). The outcome will be inner peace: “Peace I give you. My own peace I give you, a peace that the world cannot give, this is my gift to you” (Jn 14:27).