Michael Kelly
“God has abandoned you all,” was the quip from an aggressive secularist to me on social media recently. Of course, the irony was my correspondent didn’t believe in God. What was it C.S. Lewis said about atheists not believing in God and yet hating him?
Still, feeling abandoned by God is an authentic experience and one described by the great saints and spiritual writers. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane experienced his own loneliness and wept tears of blood before “an angel from heaven came and ministered to him”.
Civil rights
The great civil rights leader Martin Luther King recounts his own agony in the Garden and the angel that came to strengthen him: “One night toward the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, ‘listen, n****r, we’ve taken all we want from you, before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery’. I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached a saturation point. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.
Courage
“In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory: ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced him before,” Dr King wrote.
It is precisely when we turn to God is the depths of stress and anguish that we can experience his intimacy most.
In his iconic urbi et orbi address back in March, Pope Francis made the words of Jesus his own when he asked: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
Faith is not so much the absence of doubt, but the strength not to allow ourselves to be overcome by anxiety. Yet, our faith is often weak and we are fearful – but it is in the midst of our fear that we know that God will not leave us to the mercy of the storm.
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