The darkness is my closest friend

Wednesday, September 30, 2020                  

Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church

       (today’s lectionary)

The darkness is my closest friend

How can a man be justified before God?

Should I wish to contend with him

I could not answer him once in a thousand times.

Or a thousand times a thousand. Except, then I remember Abraham defending his nephew and his town of Sodom. And Moses pleading for the Israelites. And Jacob wrestling with the Spirit all night. The stories go on and on, that God does allow himself to be vulnerable to our pleas and passion.

In his feelings about his Maker, Job moves between fear, admiration, anger, meekness, despair, resignation, acceptance, fascination …

Should he come near me, I see him not

Should he pass by, I am not aware of him

Should he seize me forcibly, who can say him nay?

Who can say to God, “What are you doing?”

Well, any of us can ask. And God often answers, although rarely with words we expect. God changes the nature of our question and turns it back to us. That’s the nature of his love, I think. He always wants us to learn, grow, become better at living in his image.

Philip Yancey thought God teaches us to change “Why?” to “What now?” God is fascinated with each one of us, and he wants us to feel the same way, especially about ourselves, to watch with joy how he turns mud into magic and weaves a beautiful quilt out of what has been “fearfully and wonderfully made” from the very beginning.

Still, when things go sour my despair threatens to rise every morning like a mother eagle searching for food. Our babies are hungry. There is a famine. And we wonder what else we can do.

O Lord I cry out to you

In morning prayer I wait for you.

Why do you reject me

Why hide your face from me?

Jesus sometimes succumbed to what we might call despair, I think. He could be sarcastic, his words seem to betray doubt, sadness, even resignation.

Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests

But the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.

He tested the resolve of those who wanted to share his burden. In those moments, what they thought was important in their lives seemed to be of no importance to him.

Let the dead bury the dead.

No one who looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.

But Jesus is neither a casual nor a cruel shepherd. As God is watching Job, so Jesus watches his sheep. His words sound rough and even bitter at times, but his love for us, God’s children, is unchanging.

There are at least two darknesses. Satan can lead me into darkness, a fathomless black maze from which there is no escape. And God can lead me into darkness, a womblike place where I feel alone but am not. Thomas Merton calls that a “luminous darkness,” where the rods and cones in my creature’s eyes are inadequate. It takes the eyes of my Creator to see what’s in that dark closet, that black cave. And I’m not God.

Psalm 88 is one of my favorite psalms, precisely because it does not end well.

From my youth I have suffered and been close to death

I have borne your terrors and am in despair.

All day long I am surrounded like a flood

You have taken from me friend and neighbor

The darkness is my closest friend.

After the darkness, as they say, comes the dawn. Keep on reading, to the first line of the next psalm.

I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever.

       (Job 9, Psalm 88, Philippians 3, Luke 9)

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