Edmond Grace SJ provides some helpful thoughts to a disappointed believer, stricken by an illness and feeling rejected.
I have not had good health for a long time. I have a very limited food range and the drugs I am on have very unpleasant side effects. I have now been prescribed anti-depressant drugs and from my experience in the past, the side effects are horrific. Normal medicine does not seem to help me. Prayer, novenas and rosaries don’t seem to work. I think God must be punishing me for something I’ve done wrong, because I am not getting better.
Misfortune of any kind often leaves us with a sense that we are not loved by God, or what amounts to the same thing, that we are being punished in some way. Yet God’s love is a constant in all our lives even when God might seem very far removed. Whatever else we may say about suffering, God does not wish it on us. Suffering is an evil and God does not wish evil on any of creation.
You have probably heard this many times before but the truth is that there is a deep mystery in suffering. It is easy for people like me in the full of their health to say such things to people like you, but if I were not to say this I would be failing to proclaim the Gospel which we both believe in.
Feeling rejected
While we have a duty to do what we can to relieve pain and heal illness there are many ways of doing this today. There is no doubt that modern medicine has made great strides and other traditional techniques are being rediscovered. However, there are some people who still do not benefit from these developments and that can be very disheartening.
As you yourself put it, there is a sense in which you feel that there is ‘something wrong’. You can feel let down. You can even feel angry with God for allowing this to happen. Indeed, you would hardly be human if you didn’t!
This feeling of rejection can add to your pain in a very real way. One thing which must never be forgotten about feelings and emotions of any kind is that we are not responsible for them.
Like the weather
Feelings are like the weather: they can be good or bad. We can that God for a good day and we can decide to be the best of a bad day.
If we come to the conclusion that we are in some way to blame for bad weather, then we will only compound the unpleasantness caused by the rain and the cold.
It is precisely on the bad days that we must fight against discouragement, but that does not mean that we must pretend the sun is shining when its not!
The experience of Jesus
When the weather is bad it is bad and there is not getting away from it. Likewise if you feel rejected and abandoned by God – in spite of all your prayers and your novenas – that is like really bad weather. There is no escaping it, but that does not mean that there is something wrong with you.
What it does mean is that you are sharing, to a real if limited extent, in the experience of Jesus on the cross when he cried out to the Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
It is important in our suffering to be as open with God as Jesus was with the Father on the cross.
If you feel let down, tell God that you feel let down. If you are angry with God, don’t try to hide it. When you hide your true feelings from God, you are hiding yourself and when that happens God cannot reach you.
Above all else it is important to remember that God does not take it badly when we are angry with God in the midst of our suffering.
In the Old Testament the confidence which people had in God is best seen in the way they could complain and give out because of their misfortunes. It is a sign of trust that you feel in a position to give out to someone knowing that they will not hold it against you.
Giving out to God
Many of the psalms strike a note of complaint against God. Indeed those words of Jesus from the cross “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” are the first line of Psalm 21 (22) The psalmist goes on to say:
‘I call all day, my God, but you never answer;
all night long I call and cannot rest.’
The psalmist goes on to note how earlier generations put their trust in God, how they called for help and were saved and how their trust was never in vain. ‘But,’ he adds;
‘But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.
All who see me mock at me; they jeer at me, they shake their heads and sneer;
Verse after verse the psalmist goes on to describe the suffering:
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast…
my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.
After pouring out all the sorrow the psalmist makes a plea all the more urgently for God’s help and then something is renewed inside. It is a kind of resurrection in which the psalmist begins to praise God:
Those who seek the Lord will praise God..
And my soul with live for God..
People will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come.
Of course, it is easy for someone in the full of health like me, to put this down on paper, but the point is that if we trust God enough to say exactly how we are feeling, we place the most wounded part of ourselves with reach.
Inner sense of hurt
Very often the greater part of suffering is not the physical discomfort but the sense of grievance and bewilderment which goes with it. It is that inner sense of hurt above all which the Lord longs to heal.
There is no point in healing the purely physical pain without healing the inner pain, but for that to happen we must place the pain honestly, even if angrily, before the one who created us and who understands us.
Messenger, a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
This article first appeared in the
