The distant God

Day 14: When God Seems Distant

St. John of the Cross called those days of spiritual estrangement from God as “the dark night of the soul”.

I know it all too well… A majority of my years in college and a decade of my prime years before I got married was spent in that arid wasteland of doubt, sinfulness, and angst. Indeed, there were hundreds of times then when I asked God where he was. I even asked if he actually existed. It seemed, it really felt that he abandoned me.

The experience was made even more painful in that I had the luxury (!) of comparison of my childhood especially my high school days. As a kid, I felt God so close by that my kith and kin thought I was going to be a priest. I even thought so myself. In high school, I felt so close to God that I felt that even my puny requests in prayer were being granted. I felt so special and at times, invincible with God.

And then it happened.

Along with my intellectual probity came social consciousness and political concern; then coupled with emotional immaturity, God was being eased out to the periphery. Personal and family problems were the final nails to the coffin of my still juvenile faith and the sky went tumbling down. I became a communist and an atheist.

Dear Father, from how I see it all now, you may have willed it so. Maybe in your fathomless wisdom, you had allowed me to be separated from you. To test and forge me in the fire. For now I realize that I bear the understanding of how atheists and prodigal Catholics feel and what they go through. Having been separated from you myself, maybe you O Lord had seen through the future that I would know how to help troubled souls find their way back again to your loving arms.

Maybe my faith would not have been made stronger as I do believe it is now had I not gone through those dark nights. The mornings after shone brighter after those dark nights. And I do feel now just as my favorite St. Augustine, himself the epitome of a sinner turned saint, that “my heart is restless until it rests in thee, O Lord”.

Never again should I doubt God’s wise and loving design.