Part One: Searching for Light in the Darkness
Have you ever had the experience of watching someone you love go through terrible suffering, while you were completely unable to help them? The anguish, the frustration, the feeling of helplessness you went through may have been almost unbearable — and even when you found a moment to stop, catch your breath, and think about what was happening to you, perhaps the thoughts just wouldn’t go away: “Why is God letting this happen to us? What did we do to deserve this? And where is God anyway when we call out to Him — why doesn’t He do something to help us?
This anguish, this feeling of utter helplessness, this trial of faith can strike us in so many ways:
The shock of losing a loved one in a car accident.
Separation from a family member who is sent to prison, or off to war.
The sorrow of watching your parents get a divorce, and your family split-apart..
The grief of losing a loved one slowly to cancer.
The agony of the death of your own child.
We could multiply these examples by the thousand. Let’s face it: sometimes in this life we are blind-sided by an attack of grievous suffering or cruel death; it can leave our lives shattered like broken glass, with the long and arduous task left to us of picking up the pieces as best we can.
How can these things happen in God’s world — a world supposedly governed by a good and merciful Lord? And where is God when we need Him so badly? The Psalmist promises: “God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble” (Ps 46:1)… really? Sometimes it sure does not seem that way. Sometimes it seems that when we need Him most, He is farther away than ever.
I know that each person reading these words has probably experienced this kind of anguish, this trial of faith, this form of “the dark night of the soul” at one time or another.
When I was 16 I was sitting in the back seat of a car on the way home from school, leaning up against the car door while reading the first book on the Blessed Virgin Mary that I had ever picked up in my life.
A few minutes later that car was struck broadside, on the very side I was sitting, by an unmarked police car speeding through the intersection. There was an explosion; a sheet of glass smashed across my face, and I was knocked unconscious, having no idea what had just happened. I woke up about a half-hour later in the hospital emergency room; I could hear my mother almost in hysterics just outside the door; and I glanced down at my body and saw, to my horror, that I was covered in my own blood. I had suffered major facial wounds and lacerations from the broken glass, a massive concussion, and several broken teeth. They operated on me there for hours. I only remember crying and calling out in silence: “God, where are you? Why have you abandoned me?”
The second instance in my life of this kind of anguish was a family nightmare that lasted for several years. Here is the back-story.
When my daughter was 10 years old she was bullied in the first school that we sent her to, so we switched schools and she was severely bullied in the second one too. After a year and a half we took her out of that school, and six months later started her in a third one. Things went Ok for the first few months, but as her fellow students, once again, gradually realized that she was a straight-A- student, a little “brain-box,” they started to ostracize her there too. As usual, despite our pleas for help, the school did almost nothing to help her or protect her. And so, on it went….
My little daughter’s social sufferings (by the way, it was never reported that she ever did an ill-deed to anyone at any school she attended) were the constant object of prayer novenas, chaplets, and even pilgrimages by her mom and her grandmother: all, it seemed, to no avail. Sometimes I would get so frustrated that I would look up at the sky and ask: “Lord, do you still work for a living? Why can’t you DO something? Why don’t you hear our prayers and help her? Is a little humane treatment of our daughter by her peers really too much to ask?” My wife and I shuddered to think what kind of lasting damage our daughter was suffering to her sense of self-worth as a child of God.
As parents of a suffering innocent, we are in good company, I guess. Just read Psalm 77 sometime for the appropriate sentiments, or the book of Job in the Old Testament. You see, King David and Job could not always figure God out either. Even Jesus felt abandoned by His heavenly Father at the very moment He most needed Him, when Jesus cried out as He was dying on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34)
Now Catholic Christians, when we go through dark times like this, are encouraged to say to ourselves (and, when the time is right, to friends and relatives who are going through times of tribulation): “Don’t lose heart; just hang on. God cares, so he must be working in this situation somehow. One day we’ll see how; just have faith and trust in Him in the darkness.”
It’s a call to trust no matter what: an exhortation to take a leap of faith. And of course, at times it seems that there is little else we can do; the only alternative is to despair.
But I want to suggest to you here, and to explain as best I can throughout this series of articles, that there is more to the story than that. Yes, of course, faith is the only answer, the only way through the darkness and out the other side to the morning light. But even in the midst of the darkness, it does not have to be “blind faith.” There is a light that sustains us and bears us up even in the darkest night.
Robert Stackpole, STD
Mere Christian Fellowship
Next time: The Light of Objective Truth
