The Cross and the City – Abandoned
Where is God for the abandoned?
I got a call before dawn yesterday from a friend in my neighborhood. Under her apartment door she had found a note from her husband saying he won’t be back, but she’ll be hearing from his lawyer about a divorce. Anguish quivered in the voice from my cell phone. “This time, I know… he’s gone. I thought at least he would sit down and talk to me about it.” I could hear her two preschoolers in the background.
Last Monday afternoon I sat in Burger King on Colfax with a man who recounted his own story of being abandoned by his father at an early age. It was the central devastating fact of his life. His mother was ill-prepared for parenthood at all, let alone single parenthood. He learned to cope by pretty much raising himself, and making it through life as a solitary soul. He longs for love and significance, but has never been able to find it. Not even in his marriage, or in his beautiful children. For years, he and I have talked and prayed about this struggle. He wonders why it’s worth praying, since God has probably given up on him altogether. Finally, he was done even talking about it. He gathered his Whopper and french fry wrappers onto his tray, and got up and left. Three days later he slipped the letter under his wife’s door.
I have here on my computer a half-typed letter to a 17-year-old boy who is very dear to me, and I am trying to decide how to finish it. I see him every summer in Romania. He has been in orphanges all his life, 17 years of an NC-17 version of the worst of Dickens. In our summer camps we’ve had great fun together, and also conversations of almost unbearable pain. “I have been abandoned and betrayed all my life,” he told me, “first by my parents, and then by every person who I ever looked to for protection.” Along the way, he has turned to God for help—a comfort at times. But a year ago, he made plans to jump off the top of the orphanage. Why? Not even the degradation of beatings and sexual abuse had driven him to this. The final straw was when he abused another boy. He had trusted God to transform him, as he had been encouraged to do at our camp. It worked for awhile but then didn’t, to his utter shame and dismay. He doesn’t blame God for this; he has no one to blame but himself. He can’t fault God for hiding his face. But he has a sense of being absolutely and irrecoverably alone.
Where is God for the abandoned? For the shamed? For the powerless?
“Though my father and mother forsake me, you will receive me” (Psalm 27:10). This is the comfort we have from scripture. A faithful God who binds up the broken-hearted. The God of the Exodus who hears the cries of his children and delivers them. The strong God, the God who is there.
I have often comforted people with these promises of a strong, ever-present God—as I have been comforted myself. But over the years I have sat with so many seemingly godforsaken people in very dark places, and groped for more. At times—a subject for another post—I myself have been the alone one overwhelmed by darkness.
In fact, there IS more to the story of God’s compassion, and I am burrowing down into that story more deeply than ever these days. It is the story of the cross. In the cross we see God’s compassion (com + passion = “to suffer with”) in the extreme: the Deliverer himself as abandoned, powerless, and shamed. “Why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22) is a cry from the gut not only from the abandoned wife and fatherless child, but from the crucified God.
“Nothing happens to us alone. It happens to God too.” (Madeleine L’Engel) Immanuel! God with us. Not only in his glorious power but in his bleak abandoned weakness. “If I make by bed in sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). The one from whom God hid his face, the one who “descended into hell,” is it not this one who is most near to those who are most abandoned?
This of course is not new. It is the ancient story of the old rugged cross, the central story of our faith. But I believe it is “good news to the poor,” and I am very much on a quest to discover how. How to listen for it among the abandoned… how to retell it among the abandoned… how to live into it among the abandoned.
“God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.” Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God
“Kneeling Woman” sculpture by Gina Novendstern
Comments
...tears are rolling down.
...prayers are going up.
Posted by: Wes | February 25, 2006 09:30 AM