Chapter 2: The Prayer of the Forsaken (Part 2)

“To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.” St. John of the Cross

Tailor-Made Journey

Foster says that “every faith journey is tailor made.” No one can predict when they will enter or exit an experience of felt abandonment or spiritual wilderness, although it is “true that those in the first flush of faith often are given unusual graces of the Spirit, just like a new baby is cuddled and pampered. It is also true that some of the deepest experiences of alienation and separation from God have come to those who have traveled far into the interior realms of faith.”

We dwelled a bit on this developmental view of our spiritual journey: that it often begins with God giving immediate and obvious responses and miracles, to build our trust, just like a baby with a parent when a parent is immediately responsive to the baby’s cries. And then as we grow, we have to develop “object permanence”: we have to know that if our parent leaves the room, they are not totally gone/gone forever, and they have not actually abandoned us—they still exist, they will return, all will be well. And so it is with God: we need to develop “object permanence” with God ;-)  --to know He is “still there” even if we don’t immediately perceive an answer or a miracle in response to our needs and requests. We have to form a solid attachment of trust with God, just as we do with our parents, in order to have a healthy foundation for our life journey.

We also talked about how difficult the waiting in silence is for us in our day, our TV society: we are used to everything being zip-zip-zip, right here, right now! But we need to exercise and grow spiritually in times of quietude, to be able to think and reflect a little on all that has already been revealed to us by God, for example, rather than to always rush headlong into the “next thing.”

A Living Relationship

Foster describes the next aspect of the “Prayer of the Forsaken” in ways that surprised and challenged us. He says that “through the Prayer of the Forsaken, we are learning to give God…freedom.” Wanting (or trying to force) the “Creator of heaven and earth” to “instantly appear at our beck and call,” says Foster, is not dealing with the God of the Bible. God works to smash our false images and understanding of who God is; thus God’s felt absence at times can be seen as part of this grace. “In the very act of hiddenness God is slowly weaning us of fashioning Him in our own image…By refusing to be a puppet on our string or a genie in our bottle, God frees us from our false, idolatrous images.”

We processed this for a while, as this way of thinking about things was pretty new to us. We thought about how this view certainly fits with the idea of accepting our creature status before the Creator, and realizing that we cannot “manage God,” as Foster says. Some members of the group also pointed out that these experiences of total loss of control and predictability in the spiritual realm may help us stop taking God for granted…between that and Foster’s point about getting rid of idolatrous, false notions of God, we came away with a new appreciation for the cleansing potential of going through a spiritual desert!

“GOD, WHERE ARE YOU!? What have I done to make you hide from me? Are you playing cat and mouse with me, or are your purposes larger than my perceptions? I feel alone, lost, forsaken.

You are the God who majors in revealing yourself. You showed yourself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When Moses wanted to know what you looked like, you obliged him. Why them and not me?

I am tired of praying. I am tired of asking. I am tired of waiting. But I will keep on praying and asking and waiting because I have nowhere else to go.

Jesus, you, too, knew the loneliness of the desert and the isolation of the cross. And it is through your forsaken prayer that I speak these words. –Amen” 

Chapter 2: The Prayer of the Forsaken (Part 1)

“To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.” St. John of the Cross

Foster’s opening section of this chapter argues that “There is no more plaintive or heartfelt prayer than the cry of Jesus: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46b, KJV), and that, although Jesus’ experience was unique in the sense of Him as the Blameless One taking on the sin of the world, “we might as well get used to the idea that, sooner or later, we, too, will know what it means to feel forsaken by God.”

Writers in antiquity used the term Deus Absconditus—“the God who is hidden”—to describe this feeling or sense of God being absent…and Foster uses the apt term “Sahara of the Heart” to describe the feeling of inner spiritual desolation or abandonment that may come into our lives at times, in keeping with the biblical metaphor of desert or wilderness for these times.

A Major Highway

Foster encourages us that these times of spiritual dryness are “not a rabbit trail but a major highway,” listing out many examples from the Bible and Church history of saints going through such times. We remarked that this also points out that these seasons of our life have a goal, are part of the whole “plan” and journey of our life, not some dead-end or “falling off the path.” Indeed, Foster ends this section by saying that if we are faced with God’s “hiddenness,” we should not automatically take it that “God is displeased with you, or that you are insensitive to the work of God’s Spirit, or that you have committed some horrendous offense against heaven, or that there is something wrong with you, or anything. Darkness is a definite experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.”

We spent some time talking about some of the examples that Foster mentions, in particular Elijah and his time in the desert alone, feeling like he just wanted to die. We discussed the fact that deep grief, trauma, and physical exhaustion can overwhelm our ability to reason and problem-solve effectively, or to effectively manage our emotions. Small wonder, then, that these visceral human experiences can be accompanied by the sense of God’s absence—that in times of being emotionally overwhelmed and physically exhausted, we may feel cut off from God’s felt presence. The story of Elijah’s suicidal thinking in I Kings 19:4-7 demonstrates God’s compassionate “knowing” of how we are put together (Psalm 103:13-14): he did not immediately answer Elijah in his overwhelmed state, but let him fall asleep, then woke him to feed him(!), had him sleep some more, and woke him to feed him again before He spoke anything of substance to Elijah. Sometimes, if we are feeling despair and the sense of abandonment from God, we need to be sure to take care of our basic, bodily needs, so we can come to a place where we are able to listen and hear.

In keeping with Foster’s argument that desert times in our spiritual lives need not have anything to do with wrongdoing on our part, we also discussed the example of Mother Teresa. She had prayed to know more of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, to enter into the “fellowship of sharing in the suffering of Christ” (Philippians 3:10). And she did enter into an aspect of Jesus’ intense suffering on the cross: the sense of being cut off from God’s presence. Mother Teresa suffered this “dark night of the soul” (St. John of the Cross) for all the decades of her mature adult life. Those who worked and lived with her said that the sweet aroma of Christ surrounded her and flowed from her, yet she herself was completely cut off from any of this comforting, beautiful sense of God’s presence…Elijah, Jeremiah, Moses, Mother Teresa, Jesus—we are in good company, indeed, when we experience silence from the heavens!

We also read an excerpt from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest (Oct. 11) on this topic of being in a time of spiritual silence: his commentary on the passage recounting the story of Lazarus’ sickness and death, and then resurrection. “When He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days in the same place where he was." (John 11:6) Has God trusted you with a silence - a silence that is big with meaning? God's silences are His answers. Think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany [of Lazarus and his sisters, as he was dying]! Is there anything analogous to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking for a visible answer?

God will give you the blessings you ask if you will not go any further without them; but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvellous understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation [think of Jesus’ revelation of Himself to Martha as the Resurrection and the Life!]. If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes. The manifestation of the answer in time is a matter of God's sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a while you said – ‘I asked God to give me bread, and He gave me a stone.’ He did not, and to-day you find He gave you the bread of life.”

“GOD, WHERE ARE YOU!? What have I done to make you hide from me? Are you playing cat and mouse with me, or are your purposes larger than my perceptions? I feel alone, lost, forsaken.

You are the God who majors in revealing yourself. You showed yourself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When Moses wanted to know what you looked like, you obliged him. Why them and not me?

I am tired of praying. I am tired of asking. I am tired of waiting. But I will keep on praying and asking and waiting because I have nowhere else to go.

Jesus, you, too, knew the loneliness of the desert and the isolation of the cross. And it is through your forsaken prayer that I speak these words. –Amen”