“Why have you forsaken me?” Those are haunting words and I cannot imagine they were uttered in anything other than complete distress, if not despair, for in the midst of colossal suffering Jesus hung upon his cross feeling abandoned by God. At various times in our lives, we too may feel forgotten. Many of us have entered into darkness and prayed fervently for help only to hear silence in response, or beseeched heaven on our knees, hearing only the sound of our own lamentation. The cross is about what God does with suffering, and there is no life that will not carry such a cross.
In 2002, I had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst which, thankfully, was not cancerous. However, once home I developed a life-threatening infection impervious to antibiotics. I was readmitted to hospital deathly ill, and unable to stand or walk as the infection spread throughout my pelvis. Although the province’s chief infectious diseases specialist was called in, I continued to lose ground.
The following evening, around 2:00 a.m., I awakened in unbearable pain in the isolation room and couldn’t rouse support as the call bell had disengaged from my gown. By now incredibly weak, I had no breath with which to yell for assistance. Completely alone, I felt myself sinking down into some kind of abyss, yet my heart cried out words my breath could not form: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Just when my head seemed to be falling from my shoulders, and shadows hovered in the silence about to overtake me, I was given a sense of God’s absolute presence. My being seemed to fill with light, and though the pain was every bit as excruciating as before, the quality of that suffering had changed completely; I suffered the agony with hope, and not the despair summoned by overwhelming helplessness.
In remembering that experience over the years, I have continued to receive the gift of God’s grace instructing me. On that day 15 years ago when I reached the limit of my own agency, when I became completely helpless, when my ego failed, my reality became consumed by pain, and my soul reached toward God, I was given a completely different consciousness—and it made room for new life to flood into me.
At the end, God answered my prayer—not because I lived to tell this story, but because God’s self was made known to me in the midst of suffering and his Spirit filled me with hope despite it. Had I died, it would have been with confidence that he was with me. In the moments of our greatest suffering and at our death, God is with us. We are not alone.
That was the gift. That is, in a very real way, what Good Friday and Easter are about for all of us—hope in a God who keeps promises.
