Being Held by God

         

         
                        (My wife, Mary, and me, a few years ago, holding our son, Brian.)

I do not think of faith in terms of what one believes.  That is obviously one way to understand faith, and perhaps the most common: faith as a set of doctrines or beliefs to which one gives intellectual assent.   

To me faith is a not so much intellectual as experiential, emotional.  I prefer the verb trust.  Faith is trusting that in spite of all the pain and suffering of this world, there is still reason to hope in the world, in ourselves, in the future.  And for me faith begins with the experience of being held.

So much of life is aloneness and loneliness.  We wonder if anyone cares.  We wonder if God cares.

The one thing that gets us going in this life is the experience of being held.  First we are held in our mother’s womb, then we are held by her and the rest of our family and their friends.  When we are not held, and we want to be, we let that be known, and, in most cases, we are immediately held again.

However, that experience does not last for long.  Soon we are thrust into the rest of the world, we are forced to begin to “make it on our own,” and we experience the deep, existential loneliness that many philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and sociologists have worked so hard at describing.

From Holocaust survivors, like Elie Weisel in his book, Night, to one of my seminary professors, Daniel J. Simundson, we ask, as he does in the title of one of his books, Where is God in My Suffering?

When my first wife, Pauline, died in 1982, I was totally lost in grief, loneliness, and depression.  I used to walk to her grave and long to pull the earth away next to her, and to crawl in.  I missed being held by her, and I wondered if I would ever be held again.  Not by another woman, but by life itself.  As I journaled at the time, when you have wondered if you would ever know the deepest happiness, then that dream comes true, but then is shattered: how do you ever dream again?

In my loneliness and struggle I began to read some of the classics in spirituality, and the one book that stood out for me was Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude.  I read the following reflection over and over, and even typed it up and posted it on the wall of my home where I would constantly see it.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

I still don’t know exactly why these words were so powerful for me in my grief.  Even though they speak about trying to please God, in no way did I feel some kind of obligation or need to do something (what we Lutherans term the “law).  I felt that God was holding me and would “never leave me to face my perils alone, “ and this was the beginning of my healing.`

Anne Lamott tells the story of Pedro Arrupe, a Jesuit missionary in Japan, who was there when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  In his latter years, having suffered several strokes, he wrote in his journal:  “More than ever I find myself in the hands of God.  This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth.  But now there is a difference.  The initiative is entirely with God.  It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself to be totally in God’s hands.” [Quoted in Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 98.]

We, of course, continue to need to be held by other human beings throughout our lives.  And I have been held by so many people throughout the years. But that is a theme for another blog.

As children we sing, “He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands."  I suppose that starts out as a belief.  Perhaps a hope.  But it was in my deepest grief that I felt most deeply held by God.  I have felt that holding many times since, and the faith that uplifts me now is trusting that no matter what the future holds, God will keep holding me.