Chaplain's Corner

Within the next month, 2.2 billion Christians, 31.5% of the world’s population will stop to remember the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If you do any reading about the meaning of the crucifixion, you will know that Christians assign many different meanings to what happened when Jesus was crucified. An undeniable significance of the 48 hours leading up to and including Jesus’ death relates to the suffering associated with feeling abandoned.

Now the Passion narratives of the Gospels are hardly the first Christian Scriptures that reflect on this suffering. Not long ago a guest speaker at the church I attend spoke on Psalm 88, a passage of scripture that some call the darkest chapter in the Bible. Even most of the laments in the Psalms end with a hint of hope, but not Psalm 88. Here are its concluding words: “From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me.  All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.” Sounds a bit like the opening lines of the Simon and Garfunkel song, Sounds of Silence: “Hello, darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…”

Many, in an attempt to push such a feeling away deny that a Christian should ever feel abandoned. Nice try, but there are millions of Christian folks who trust authentically in God who experience long periods of time in this sense of being abandoned by everyone, including God. This is part of the human condition and denial will not change it.

My belief regarding the Bible forces me to conclude that God himself wants us to understand that this experience, far from reflecting the reality of being abandoned by God, reflects the difficulty we have, even as we embrace Him by faith, to “experience” his presence in the darkness. Like the writer of Psalm 88, we have felt and expressed the despair of feeling abandoned: the despair of coming to believe that the “darkness” of our lives is our dearest friend. That both human and divine supports have failed us.

But what possible benefit could this have? How can this experience have any holy benefit? It is in these times that faith is most authentic. When I “feel” God’s presence, when I experience the support of others, when in life’s difficulties I can rise above those difficulties like a surfer rides a wave, it is quite easy to trust God. But when we get swallowed by the darkness, when we  get rolled along the bottom of the ocean by the waves, when we fear that we will not rise to catch even a final breath, when God and others seem to have disappeared and left us in the most unimaginably impossible situation – that the most authentic faith emerges.

You may be in one of these darkest times, you may feel like the Psalmist that darkness is your closest friend, that nobody including God can help you and that nobody even cares. I want you to know that God recognizes those feelings, in fact he inspired one of the Psalmist to pen them and included them in the Bible. These words exist in the Bible because God knows we feel these things and he acknowledges these feelings without judgment, without criticism, without taking offense. When we trust God in those times, such faith is so much deeper and real and precious to God than the faith we so easily have when we are able to rise above the troubles of life. If you are relating to the final verses of Psalm 88, please keep trusting God, remember “we walk by faith, not by sight (experience)”.