Lord, I want to share with you what I’m carrying inside me, something that I don’t understand.
I ask you to forgive my incoherencies and my lack of faith, but I trust that I can be transparent with you. While you were physically among us, you had great patience with your companions and disciples; today, I ask you to have it with me.
When I see the news of what’s happening in distinct regions of our world — wars, genocides, repression of migrants, famines, migrations, ecological tragedies — I feel anxious, I feel rage and a profound sadness. I feel like I’m in a circle of impotence that weakens me; it’s hard for me to see beyond what I can observe in reality; I feel your absence, and I hear the clamor in my soul.
Forgive me, but I don’t understand your parable about the wheat and chaff (Matt 13:24-30), about why you have chosen to let the wheat (good) and the weeds (evil) grow together until harvest (the end of the world) instead of pulling up the weeds now.
What else has to happen to recognize violence and evil? How long are we going to wait to rip away evil? What should we do, what actions should we take, in these situations according to your message? Patience? Resignation? Turn the other cheek? Carry the cross?
Today, I connect with what the psalmists felt in their pilgrimage: “Why, Lord, do you stand afar and pay no heed in times of trouble?” (Ps 10:1); “Awake! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Rise up! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face; why forget our pain and misery?” (Ps 44:24-25).
Today, I also identify with your cry on the afternoon of your death: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46).
Nothing that is human was strange to you. I understand that you came to feel the desperation and bewilderment of God’s abandonment that I also feel in these times.
I’m struggling to comprehend all of this; I feel overwhelmed. I’m searching for things that are certain, when there aren’t any certainties; I’m searching for peace, when it’s not to be found. In the dark night, my soul lays bare, without certainties.
I look around me, I review history and recognize that I am not alone on this road. Many brothers and sisters in faith have traveled this road during the “dark night of the soul.” You yourself, Lord, experienced this when, in the midst of pain and desperation, you cried: “My God, my God …” It was a cry that, at the same time, expressed your relationship with your Father, the bond that sustained you in the midst of your anguish.
The “mystics,” those who not only have met you but have experienced you, tell us, “The darker the night, the closer the dawn.” In these moments of pure faith, at the threshold of a deeper communion with you, we can stop clinging to ideas we have about you and rest in you and experience your love, which is offered to us from eternity.
Lord, today I ask you for the grace to accept what I don’t understand, to believe that when I fully entrust myself to you, when I stop grasping for external securities and open myself, I will find you where you have always been, waiting for me. Together, we will pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), and “not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
Ricardo Márquez, PhD, can be reached at marquez_muskus@yahoo.com.
