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.