‘You did it to me’

The experience of the absence of God might be cause for despondency, discouragement or even despair. It could also be an occasion of grace.

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

Every parenting adult at some time has played a game of peek-a-boo with a child or grandchild. The temptation is too great to resist. Peals of ecstatic laughter leaping from the enthralled child bring as much joy to the adult who is in full command. The age-span over which this works, however, is a short one. For ironically, as one theory proposes, it is only the child’s gullibility that keeps the fun going, so long as he or she can still be beguiled by the illusion of being in control of the appearance and disappearance of the adult accomplice. Until it runs foul. The adult hides a moment too long. The child panics. Tears may come. Dare a parent confess the game is but a ruse, after emerging from oblivion, to embrace the child with affectionate assurances that all will be well. The child is loved.

Is this in the end a cruel game adults can play, taking advantage of the innocence of a youthful heart? Who can deny that both child and adult seem to be enjoying it for the most part, albeit for different reasons? If the child is under the impression that he or she is in total control of the world, what harm is there in learning a big life lesson that no one can command what others do or think? Who can fault a parent for at once using play as a form of reality therapy while deriving satisfaction from a chance to share a big hug, even at the cost of a few tears? Besides, hasn’t even God been known to be undiscoverable, unknown, indeed unknowable at times — present (for God is always present) yet uncontrollable?

Far be it from me to draw a comparative equivalence between divine play and human mischief. Christ’s parables are not always to be taken literally, though they do serve a pedagogic and catechetical purpose. Games also can do that, teach teamwork, patience, discipline, cooperation and the acceptance of success and failure as a part of life. 

We may have had moments in our own lives when we feel so close to God, maybe experiences that we wish would never go away, a taste of “heaven on earth.” They may not have been theophanies — radical revelations of the glorious presence of God — like the Holy Spirit at Pentecost or the baptism of Christ, or the Transfiguration, or the mystical revelation that dazzled Saul on the road to Damascus, leading to instant conversion.

Less dramatic are those “epiphanies” or manifestations, some of which we may deem chance (the logic of God?), wherein we feel moved by a power outside of ourselves. It could simply be a kindness shown, a pleasant but unexpected surprise, a call from an old friend, a remarkable recovery, a loving touch. We may or may not have prayed for it specifically. How do we know someone else instead, some angel or saint, had not asked a favor for us?

That is what grace is. A favor. An unearned gift. It is what God does all the time because God IS love. We want those we love to be happy and we want them to have what will make them happy. That is why, at the very least, friends do not lead friends into sin, because sin brings unhappiness and desolation. Or to put it in a positive way, we want our friends to be holy. This is what God wants for all of us, so God does things to get our attention so that we may be able to receive the graces he desires to shower us with so we may be holy.

Sometimes we may feel that God is not paying attention to us at all, that he is not even hearing our prayers. Like the child in the peek-a-boo game who thinks he or she can make the parent come and go, terrified when the parent hides too long, God may take his time to respond, to manifest his presence.

The experience of the absence of God, often described as acedia or “dryness,” might be cause for despondency, discouragement or even despair. It could also be an occasion of grace. The feeling of God’s absence, of our helplessness and “distance” from God could be an invitation to deepen our thirst for God. Undoubtedly one of the most authentic — and divine — manifestations of love, Jesus himself cried out, literally from the Cross, “I thirst.” His sacred heart longs for our love with a burning passion far beyond our capacity to feel or understand. We think it is we who are searching for God? Consider that the entire Bible is full of signs and stories of God’s relentless search for us, for the human heart. It’s why “the Word was made flesh” to dwell among us, to suffer and die for us, absorb our sins and feed us with his broken body and outpoured blood. “Do this in memory of me.” 

It may well be that God’s “absence” is the illusion, not his presence, in much the same way that the parent, hiding for a moment from the child, withholds from sight the “thereness,” only to spring forth again in the joy of a loving embrace. Heaven must surely be something akin to this as a reunion among loved ones in the eternal presence of God, no longer hidden by the veil of mortality. Our human myopia inhibits our ability to see beyond the mist and haze of our fears and anxieties, our guilt and our low expectations — yes, our sins (always an exercise in settling for less), stones we cast in God’s path to us. 

Fresh back from Kolkata, where the honor and privilege of celebrating Mass at the tomb of Mother Teresa was given me, it becomes clearer how profoundly present Jesus is in the poor and suffering, the outcasts left to die on the street or isolated in institutions from family and friends who no longer come to visit. Mother Teresa illustrated the manner in which those who languish from neglect and abandonment are Christ present to us. Grasping the hand once of a volunteer yearning for a deeper encounter with him, she placed it flat down, counting on each finger the five words of Jesus: “You did it to me.” 

How better to touch the loving presence of Jesus than to console his thirst for the heart of every child of God? Tears may come, as in the parabolic peek-a-boo game, but there will also be joy. This I witnessed with the Missionary Sisters of Charity in their prayer and work among those whose wounds they wash and bandage or harbor from the noisy streets to die in peace, no longer alone. If Jesus was trying to hide himself from us, he was doing a very poor job of it.