A Meditation on Abandonment to God

My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Abandonment. A word of devastation. A word of pain. A word of rejection. Forsaken, despised by others, we all know something of the sting and terror of that kind of abandonment. No one wants to be abandoned by someone.

Psalm 13 is a psalm of abandonment. It is the desperate cry of someone that has no one left, and apparently not even God, to help him. The first part says:

How long, O LORD Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

When someone abandons us, when we are the object of abandonment, then devastation, desolation, desertion, renunciation and rejection are all appropriate synonyms, and valid expressions of what we might feel. Like the psalmist, when many think of God, they immediately think of abandonment in that sense of the word.

Jesus knew what it was like to be the object of abandonment by those he loved. In his last hours he was abandoned by his closest followers, denied vehemently and publicly by one of his closest friends Peter, and rejected by the people who had hoped that he might save them. Matthew 27:39-41 records that:

Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, "You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!"

In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. "He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! He's the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.' " In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

Finally, when there was nothing left, no more humiliation that could be inflicted, no one to turn to, and after three hours of the excruciating pain and humiliation of public crucifixion we read that Jesus in agony cried out to God the words of the devasted psalmist from Psalm 22:1:

46 About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"—which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

When we Christians disrespect others, forsake them, withhold forgiveness and refuse to listen to their stories of pain and devastation, then we only serve to confirm their suspicion that God has abandoned us, that he has abandoned them. May God forgive our sins, as we forgive the sins of others.

Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

There is a big difference between abandonment by someone, and abandonment to someone. Changing that one small word transforms pain into joy, fear into love, and despair into hope.

Abandonment to someone is different. In abandonment to someone we are the subject of abandonment, not the object. This abandonment is voluntary. Abandonment to someone involves an act of trust, an act of the will, a decision to make. It takes courage and faith in the fidelity and integrity of another to abandon oneself to them. We have a sense of how this works in everyday life in friendship, in causes, and even more so in marriage. We abandon ourselves to someone out of love and affection for the other person.

This is not abandonment in the sense of desolation, desertion, or forsakenness. Rather, in a positive sense, it refers to the notion of surrender or committment to someone or something greater than oneself – to someone worthy of our trust and commitment.

When a person abandons themself to a worthy cause, or commits themself in marriage to the love of their life, it involves a resolution to abandon themself unreservedly to that cause or person. You can’t hold back out of fear of being abandoned. In that act, in that commitment, the whole heart and imagination is captured by the object of its affection and desire. In the same way, abandoning oneself to our eternal, infinite, personal Creator is to open ourself up to his presence in our lives and recognize his work in the lives of those around us. This is the positive side of abandonment to someone.

However, there is a negative sense to abandoning ourselves to others and to God. Not “negative” in terms of disadvantage, but rather in terms of arranging our priorities and desires correctly, which leads to focusing on some things at the expense of others.

We know this to be true in all of life. At times we must abandon some things, the lesser things, in order to attain the greater. We save money, giving up buying now that we might purchase something better in the future. We vacation and rest, giving up working that we might live fuller lives and be more effective when we return to work.

We fast, and realize that food is not our life. We seek solitude, and return to richer friendships as a result. We pray and meditate, forsaking other activities and other people momentarily for time alone with God, and return with a deeper awareness of living in a world charged with his grandeur as Gerard Manly Hopkins so beautifully stated.

This type of abandonment means joyfully choosing to be released from the burden of other lesser commitments, such as when a person commits to a life of “forsaking all others” so that they might be completely single-minded towards their spouse. The husband does not retreat from life to do abandon himself to his wife, but rather embraces the joyful reality and expectation of their new life together.

In all of life we recognize and affirm the good, but at the same time give our greater allegiance to the greater. Abandonment to God is a renunciation of other, lesser loves for the greater prize of loving God above all others, unreservedly relinquishing our hold on these lesser things. We relinquish the lesser that we might attain to the greater. Augustine, with his neoplatonic understanding of a hierarchy of goodness, understood this and tried to teach his readers:

…through reflection on his own experience, that we must think about what we love and how we love the things we love. In his view, it is better to love some things than others. Augustine suggested that our desires, our loves, can only be satisfied in God… Speaking to God [in The Confessions], he prays, “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

From p. 82 of Christian Love, by Bernard Vincent Brady [emphasis mine].

Therefore, in abandonment to God we reorient our focus around God and his loving, governing (i.e. providential) presence (what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God”) in the world. That is why the prayer Jesus taught his disciples begins in this way (Matthew 6:9-10):

⁹"This, then, is how you should pray:
   " 'Our Father in heaven,
   hallowed be your name,
¹⁰your kingdom come,
   your will be done
      on earth as it is in heaven.

The emphasis in the Lord’s prayer is very much on abandoning oneself to God’s loving parental care in all things. Jesus lived this type of abandonment to God. In the darkest moment of his death, in the moment when the powers of evil triumphed over this invincible man, his words proclaimed his complete trust in God. The Gospel of John states in 19:30 that Jesus said, “It is finished.” This meant that his mission was now accomplished, and he was announcing it to the world for all to hear.

But he said something else too. Something else, not to the bystanders, but to God. According to Luke (Luke 23:46), his last words from the cross immediately before he died went like this:

46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.

As his followers, we are to follow Jesus’ example of abandonment to God. The writer of Hebrews highlights this sense of following Jesus’ example of abandonment to God and letting go of lessor loves and priorities to achieve the greater in Hebrews 12:1-2:

1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

The beauty of approaching God in this way, is that opening and expanding our hearts in receiving and giving love to God increases our capacity to do the same with those around us. Loving God enables us to better love our neigbor. This seems contrary to reason, but is a common theme in historical Christian writing.

I am very aware as I write this of the uncertainty that life and our many failures present, and of the fear that such uncertainty about the future can bring. My friends with Cancer, with a loved one suffering from Parkinson’s, with chronic fatigue, without employment, or suffering in untold other ways feel this uncertainty much more keenly than I ever could, but in the end, it is our hope that sustains us all - our hope that even through tragedy we can triumph in life. This is our sure hope because we have the example of Jesus demonstrating how it is done. It is his example which enables us to cast our hopes, fears and very lives every moment into God’s care.

When we live in the light of this hope, the cry of desperation in Psalm 13 given above does not have to be the final word. We, like the psalmist, can persevere by proclaiming with confidence our abandonment to the loving embrace of our Father in heaven:

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

Perhaps it is fitting and best to end this meditation with a prayer from Celtic Daily Prayer (Meditation day 4, p. 49).

PRAYER OF ABANDONMENT TO GOD
Father, I abandon myself
   into Your hands.
Do with me what You will,
whatever You do, I will thank You.
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only Your will be done in me,
  as in all Your creatures,
and I’ll ask nothing else, my Lord.

Into Your hands I commend my spirit;
I give it all to You
   with all the love of my heart,
for I love You, Lord,
   and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into Your hands
   with a trust beyond all measure,
   because you are my Father.

Charles de Foucault.

Join with me, however hesitantly and fearfully, in acknowledging our shared dependence on the Good and Loving One greater than ourselves, the One who rewards our trust by giving us more of Himself.

Work, Providence and the Kingdom – Part I

Our Father in heaven
May your name be hallowed
May your righteous rule be fully revealed
May your will be done on earth as in heaven
Give us today our daily bread
And forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us
Save us from the time of trial and rescue us from the evil one
For yours are the kingdom and the power and the glory through all time
Amen.[1]

Matthew 6:9-13

From Jesus’ model prayer we learn a great deal about not only how to pray, but also what kind of world we live and work in, how we are to view that world, and what God expects of us as we work our way through it. It speaks of who God is and how we are to acknowledge his transcendence and Fatherly care. It says to pray for his kingdom, his rule, to come – to be made complete in the soon-future, but also to be manifested in tangible ways in our lives, our work, and world today. Then the prayer expresses this profound hope again, but in different words this time, by seeking the realization of God’s loving will in our everyday experience. And, lest we grow proud and callous towards God’s providential care, we are expected every day to ask anew for his provision over our most basic needs. Do we ever stop to think how God answers that request? Because in his providence he does, every day.

Since we are in community with our neighbors, this prayer forces us to recognize that in our work and other aspects of our life we often offend and poison others through sins of commission and omission. We must bring those large and small debts to God, and deal with them so they do not accrue on our balance sheets and poison our relationship with our loving Father. But we humans are not the only active agents in this world; there are principalities and powers that are set against us and the purposes of God. We need protection and deliverance from them. We need strength to stand. We are to resist the forces of darkness that seek to destroy our potential and our future, that work to create “structures of sin” in human organizations – corporate, political and otherwise – and encourage the development of work environments that seem designed to destroy our humanity: our body, and our spirit.

Our modern world is organized around work. This may seem obvious, but try to imagine a world without work. Is that even possible? Maybe you can, but then try to think carefully about how such a world could be a meaningful one for human beings. It is by no means an easy task.[2] Part of the reason for this is that God has designed us to work, to fill his creation with the “fruits of our labors” as we shape it and tend it.

Work may be viewed as little more than a means of providing for our needs and wants. Or maybe we find it – at least some of the time – to be an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding activity in itself. For many, work is a dehumanizing drudgery that eviscerates and enervates the worker even as it provides the means to live another day. Working is part of what we are intended to do as God’s creatures, and yet this very statement seems difficult to accept because of the many struggles and frustrations we encounter in our work, and what we can observe about the alienating nature of work for much of the world’s population.

The final line of the prayer reminds us that this present world - as it is now with all its often dehumanizing and alienating work - is not the end. The story has not yet reached the final chapter. God is still in control and active in the renewal and redemption of all things in his good creation in Christ; his kingdom will come, and is coming. His power will accomplish this, and He will be glorified. He will be glorified in our work. He will restore his creation and transform the fruits of our work into things fitting for life and ministry after heaven and earth have joined and the Lamb is the light of the eternal city.

---

[1] Author’s translation.

[2] Kory Schaff, ed., Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 1.

Image sourced from http://hr.ucsb.edu/icons/work_life.jpg.

The Imitation of Christ By Thomas A. Kempis

Jesus has many lovers of His heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of His cross. He has many seekers of consolation, but few of tribulation. He finds many companions at His feasting, but few at His fasting. All desire to rejoice in Him; Few are willing to endure anything for Him. Many follow Jesus as far as the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the cup of His passion. Many reverence His miracles, but few will follow the shame of His cross. Many love Jesus as long as no adversaries befall them. Many praise and bless Him so long as they receive some consolation from Him. But if Jesus hide Himself and leave them but for a brief time, they begin to complain or become overly despondent in mind.

Thomas à Kempis

Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace each of us may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your  justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.†

From The Divine Hours.

Ash Wednesday: The Prayer Appointed for the Week

Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent:

Create and make in me a new and contrite heart, that I,
worthily lamenting my sins and acknowledging my wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. †

From The Divine Hours – Prayers for Springtime.

On Truth by Harry Frankfurt

This last week I read Harry Frankfurt’s wonderful little gold book, On Truth, for this semester’s philosophy class, Writing for Publication, in the Denver Seminary MA Philosophy of Religion degree program. The book is short, only 101 pages, but it sure packs a punch.

I thought that I might include a few quotes here to give a feel for the types of issues that Frankfurt is dealing with and the approach that he takes. In this book he presents a compelling argument against the postmodern tendency to deny the reality of objective truth. I would recommend the book to anyone who would like a counterpoint to antirealist and relativistic notions of truth.

On the incoherence of denying the three classic laws of thought as applied to truth both epistemically and metaphysically:

“…even those who profess to deny the validity or the objective reality of the true-false distinction continue to maintain without apparent embaressment that this denial is a position that they do truly endorse. The statement that they reject the distinction between true and false is, they insist, an unqualifiedly true statement about their beliefs, not a false one. This prima facie incoherence in the articulation of their doctrine makes it uncertain precisely how to construe what it is that they propose to deny. It is also enough to make us wonder just how seriously we need to take their claim that there is no objectively meaningful or worthwhile distinction to be made between what is true and what is false.” (p. 9)

On the idea that normative (i.e. evaluative) judgements cannot properly be regarded is being either true or false:

“…societies cannot afford to tolerate anyone or anything that fosters a slovenly indifference to the distinction between true and false. Much less can they indulge the shabby, narcissistic pretense that being true to the facts is less important than being “true to oneself.” If there is any attitude that is inherently antithetical to a decent and orderly social life, that is it.” (p. 33)

So is the question of truth as an objective reality something that actually matters?

“Our success or failure in whatever we undertake, and therefore in life altogether, depends on whether we are guided by truth or whether we proceed in ignorance or on the basis of falsehood. It also depends critically, of course, on what we do with the truth. Without truth, however, we are out of luck before we even start…

We really cannot live without truth. We need truth not only in order to understand how to live well, but in order to know how to survive at all… truth is not a feature of belief to which we can permit ourselves to be indifferent. Indifference would be a matter not just of negligent imprudence. It would quickly prove fatal.” (pp. 36-7)

Frankfurt spends a whole chapter discussing some of Spinoza’s insights on truth and joy, and ends the chapter with this thought:

“Practically all of us do love truth, whether or not we are aware that we do so. And, to the extent that we recognize what dealing effectively with the problems of life entails, we cannot help loving truth.” (pp. 47-8)

So why do truths possess instrumental value (i.e. are useful in a pragmatic fashion for getting by in the world)?

“Insofar as truths possess instrumental value, they do so because they capture and convey the nature of these realities. Truths have practical utility because they consist of, and because they can therefore provide us with, accurate accounts of the properties (including, especially, the causal powers and potentialities) of the real objects and events with which we must deal when we act.” (p. 52)

On the nature of factuality:

“Now, the relevant facts are what they are regardless of what we may happen to believe about them, and regardless of what we may wish them to be. This is, indeed, the essence and the defining character of factuality, of being real: the properties of reality, and accordingly the truths about its properties, are what they are, independent of any direct or immediate control of our will…

The facts – the true nature of reality – are the final and incontrovertible recourse of inquiry. They dictate and support an ultimately decisive resolution and rebuttal of all uncertainties and doubts.” (pp. 54-55)

And, to end this with an obligatory SG-1 reference…

Waiting for the World to Fall

I heard the Jars of Clay song “Waiting for the World to Fall” from the album Music Inspired by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on Pandora a few times this week, and it moved me so much that I thought that I would mention it here.

For those that have not heard the song, here is an excellent fan-video that overlays the song with clips from early parts of the movie where the Pevensie children have yet to discover what lies within the wardrobe.

Here are the lyrics (Copyright: ©2005 Bridge Building):

I'm afraid it's been too long
to try to find the reasons why
I let my world close in around
a smaller patch of fading sky
But now I've grown beyond the walls
to where I've never been
And it's still winter in my wonderland

Chorus

I'm waiting for the world to fall
I'm waiting for the scene to change
I'm waiting when the colors come
I'm waiting to let my world come undone
I close my eyes and try to see
the world unbroken underneath
The farther off and already
it just might make the life I lead
A little more than make-believe
when all my skies are painted blue
And the clouds don't ever change
the shape of who I am to You

Chorus

I'm waiting for the world to fall
I'm waiting for the scene to change
I'm waiting when the colors come
I'm waiting to let my world come undone
When I catch the light of falling stars my view is changing me
My view is changing me
I'm waiting

The lyrics and tone of the song capture and evoke the deep longing that we all feel for transcendence. As Marc Newman points out in his review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

There is no way to completely describe the feeling you get when you experience a moving passage of music, tremble beneath the array of stars on a dark and moonless mountain night, or even when you bask in the afterglow of a particularly wonderful day. C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, called this feeling sehnsucht, which, roughly translated, means longing.

The longing of sehnsucht is not a thing to be grasped. It is always in passing, like an image that strikes upon the senses and is gone. … It is a kind of desire that knows it cannot be fulfilled here, yet is worth desiring and seeking after nonetheless.

Wonder

Lewis argued that humans long “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” We were made for awe. Unfortunately, the modern privileging of scientific fact as the “only” reliable type of truth often tries to push aside the competing truth claims of intuition and revelation. But the longing for transcendence -- the desire of human nature to move beyond that nature into something beyond – will not be denied.

As I reflected on this, it also reminded me of N.T. Wright’s idea of our quest for the transcendent and the spiritual as the “echoes of a voice” in his book Simply Christian:

“If anything like the Christian story is in fact true (in other words, if there is a God whom we can know most clearly in Jesus), this interest is exactly what we should expect; because in Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love. (p. 24)

James Sire, in his excellent review of Wright’s book, notes that: 

Wright identifies four main "echoes of a voice" (recalling Peter Berger's "signals of transcendence"): "the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty."

Each points to a realm beyond the material. Ultimately, Wright argues, these voices join the more direct revelation of God to become "the voice of Jesus, calling us to follow him into God's new world—the world in which the hints, signposts, and echoes of the present world turn into the reality of the next one."

Dan Haseltine points out in his comments on the song that Narnia embodies that sense of longing, but as a fantasy is able to capture our imaginations and provide a glimpse into the discovery of the transcendent reality that lies behind our oft mundane lives:

The song is really a song about discovery.

It's kind of being in a world where things maybe aren't as they should be or kind of living a mundane existence and wanting something more and then getting a glimpse of what that really is like and having your world kind of shift, your paradigm change, and that's what we loved about this story, was just the way there was this great movement and discovery of a whole new world.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes states:

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

I’m waiting…

Eternal Timefullness

Some poignant thoughts on the ‘eternal timefullness’ of unleashing creativity in our artistic endeavors (in which I would certainly include coding) from Refractions (pp. 15-16), the amazing new book by Makoto Fujimura:

The process of creating renews my spirit, and I find myself attuned to the details of life rather than being stressed by being overwhelmed. I find myself listening rather than shouting into the void. Creating art opens my heart to see and listen to the world around me, opening a new vista of experience. This is the gift of the “second wind.” Such a state taps into what I now call eternal timefullness.

A timeful experience is given when our minds are allowed to fully respond to the senses, to tap into the eternal reality that God opens for us via creativity. It’s what William Blake, the eighteenth-century poet, meant when he wrote,

“To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild lower, / hold ininity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.” 

In order to “see a world in a grain of sand,” we must pause to pay attention to the details of life, to let our eyes wander into the crevices of the earth below, to observe the shadows as well as the light, to perhaps even see how the light is refracted in the fragmental remains of sands. And such observational skills must be cultivated as a form of discipline, even in the midst of the hectic lives we lead.