Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh —
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.-Dante Aligheiri, Inferno I:1-9
trans. Hollander & Hollander
In the middle of my twenty-sixth year, the Lord left me.
You have to read this essay like a psalm, not a 96th thesis. This is art, not theological treatise.
I had been a Christian since childhood, burned with a holy fire in my teen years, passed through it into early adulthood with my faith as steady as coals, banked and cozy through what had been my darkest nights. Life had been difficult and painful at times, joyful at others, but I had never once doubted the existence of a God and that this God cared for me. I had written here—a God who loved me—but the words feel too shiny, even for what I thought back then. Love is a human word. I had never once doubted that there was a God and that he had an interest in human lives, mine in particular.
In the middle of my twenty-sixth year, this God left me. It was as if, one morning, my life was vacated of meaning and purpose and I could find no windows or doors into a better one. I was in a city I couldn’t afford, in a dead-end job I couldn’t get out of, and I, who wanted only to be a writer, couldn’t get anything published. I wanted to leave. I wanted to start over in a new place where things wouldn’t be so desperate. I was willing to change anything: career, city, even, at times, husband; even at times, writing. I was willing to give up anything—all the things I hated and even the few remaining things I loved—to dig a tunnel or trapdoor or path away from the drains I circled. And I couldn’t. I applied for jobs and got either no response or shockingly quick refusals. I wrote my heart out and no editor, agent, or publisher was interested in any of piece of it. I looked at other places to live, always. I looked at other lives, always, and I wanted them. I knew they weren’t perfect, but they had people in them who didn’t seem to be waking to the same cycle of lonely, empty jobs and literary rejections that I was, people who were doing something, going somewhere. Worse, I looked around my own life and for the first time, I felt no presence of God, not even in whispers. Not because I was not successful or wealthy—I had never thought that writing essays would make me rich—but because no thing I did at work or at home had any staying power, any effect on anyone or anything, not even in minutiae. Vapor, vapor, everything is vapor.
People I knew in this city came and left, their degrees completed, their patience for expensive, poorly-maintained apartments worn out. Some got better jobs, some had children, some felt the call of the hills, or their hometowns, or the west coast. All left, all but me. My husband was still in school, hard at work on a Master’s degree, and then PhD coursework, then a dissertation. Even he was, in a sense, going somewhere. I was not.
In the beginning, I was twenty-six and newly married. Since then, my hair has started to grey. First, a single, jagged lightning bolt on the top of my head, only visible if I parted my hair at a certain angle. Then, a finger waving out from the front of my hairline. Then, three. Then, tendrils, everywhere, as if ivy was sending runners in all directions, releasing its silver roots through my skin. When I had more greys than I could track, I admitted, for the first time, that though nothing save my body was changing, my life was passing.
I grew older in other ways, too. Within a few years of moving to this city, I realized I wanted a garden. Then, I wanted a study to wallpaper. Perhaps, I realized, I wanted to have children, one day, if I was still able when the time came we could afford it. Every day, I wanted another cat. I wanted to quit my jobs. I wanted to publish. I wanted to not be so tired. Or rather, I wanted to feel, when I was tired, that I had accomplished something with my energy. That I was working, and my work had meaning. I wanted another life. I prayed, for years and God did not respond, not with a new life or a change of heart about the one that I had or a sudden experience of his presence as I had once felt it, or anything but time, passing.
This fixity—this amount to which I could not change even the smallest thing about my life—was the closest thing I had to an experience of God for years. Not a sense of his presence or his spirit walking beside me, but a sense of his iron-grip holding everything exactly as it was. Like sealing Noah in the ark, God had shut me in. I roared, but the door did not open.
I thought a lot about Job. One day, God calls him my servant and boasts that there is no one on earth like him. The next day, God accepts a challenge from the satan and turns Job over to be tested. Job loses everything: first his children and his wealth, then, because Job passes this test of faith and does not curse God for his losses, he loses his health, his body breaking out in in Biblical boils he rasps with sharps edges of broken pottery as he sits among the ashes.
After all these devastations, only Job’s wife and a few friends remain, their voices forming a chorus of bad advice. Job’s unnamed wife suggests he curse God and die; his friends encourage him to repent from the sins that must have brought this calamity, this wrath of God, upon him.
While I don’t claim to be without sin, or even righteousness enough to be called out by name in a heavenly council, I, like Job, knew that I was not being punished. God had withdrawn from me, not I from him. Still, I prayed to see what I could change, if there was something I could do to bring God back, to suffuse my life with his presence again. No answer came. In this, there was consolation and desolation. Nothing to repent from. Nothing I could do about anything. Vapor, vapor, everything is vapor.
I can’t say what Job felt during his testing. We have some of his dialogue in the text, but the gap between experience and language is a chasm, not a crack. In the early years of my solitude, I felt an existential pain not because I struggled to hold onto some kind of faith or religious identity—let the philosophers and the holy teens attempt to prove and disprove God. if intellectual victories were the stakes, I could have moved on long ago—No, I ached because I believed in God, yet it seemed he no longer cared for me. Or rather, that I still knew, in a strange way, that he did, but it was a much harder, a more ancient and colder kind of caring than I was used to. One day God’s hand was open to me and the next, no matter how hard I cried in the shower or screamed in my prayers or to my husband, who could only watch, it was folded shut in.
When Christians I know talk about entering a wilderness, about waiting on the Lord in his absence, about having metaphorical doors miraculously closed in their faces, their testing ends in months, or weeks, or sometimes days. It is a dark night of the soul. It does not last through multiple Christmases and Easters and Pentecosts, those feasts of the coming of the Lord, certainly not more than can fit on one hand. As they pass through this refining fire, this testing in the wilderness, they learn something about God, or themselves, or both, and then they are released. They return to civilization enlightened, proven, closer to God. They use the past tense—I was tested.
There was a time when I might have said that God tests those he loves—Christ, for one. Job, for another. That God does not give us more than we can handle. That the testing of faith produces perseverance. That God loves us enough to give us what we need, not what we want. These are the tests, the language, of other people.
For years, God gave only enough. We never went hungry. Work always appeared when I needed it. But it was a meagre life. There was no blossoming, no blessing of my work, no abundance of energy or life, no fruit on my vines. I did not want to carry on. And yet, I did. I don’t know how. I didn’t want to. You can call this the work of the spirit, keeping me alive.
For years, I prayed for God to hear me. I was raised Baptist, so I wasn’t passive outside of prayer, either. I knew that sometimes God worked despite me and sometimes he worked through me. So kept at it, still applying for jobs in and out of my field, still submitting my writing, still cajoling my husband into considering moving, still sculpting private fantasies of what could happen if change were possible—and failing miserably. Still, I prayed each morning, and I looked for God on my way to work, and I tried to speak to him. Some days I prayed not for a new circumstance but a new heart. I would have accepted a new heart in lieu of a new life. I read my Bible, mainly the strange stories of Genesis and its inhuman God. Sometimes I read prosperity tweets that said something like, “If you’ve been faithful, and you’re still waiting for answers, I promise you, God will show up in a big way when he does.” I was desperate. On good days, I told God I was waiting for him to show up in a big way. On others, I prayed the guttural, screaming, weeping prayers of David, who I only liked in the psalms. In narrative, David had lost my sympathy once I realized how many wives he had, what happened to Michal. Sometimes I journaled instead, writing a way of controlling my thoughts. Regardless, I circled back: God, who had once cared for me, who loved and kept his promises to David despite the polygamy and the murder and the self-absorption, who had promised his followers life, abundant, had abandoned me to a meaningless existence. I hurt, all the time, and there was silence.
And then, after a few years, I stopped begging for miraculous change. It was not a conscious choice, but withering exhaustion. My prayers were repetitive screams. They opened an abyss of hurt, and they went into an abyss of silence. God was holding the door—the door to his presence, the door to any change or establishment in my life, the door for direction—shut. I had known him for long enough to know this, to feel his hand, even across a wall. What I did not know was why, other than that God was God, and it would do no good to demand explanations or release. When he was ready to come back, he knew where to find me.
Around the same time, I stopped expecting to be able to explain my life to other people. Even this essay, which for many years would have felt unthinkable, explores, but does not explain. God is the answer, but he is not the reason.
I thought about Job’s friends, and I thought about the sanctity of relationships. What was happening was between me and God. Outside of us, it was unspeakable, incommunicable. I was waiting, this much I could tell others, if they pressed for explanation for the strange, sad turn my life had taken. I was waiting on the Lord. I found companionship not in the lives of people I knew, but in the Bible, in the stories of other people God tests and tries and leaves waiting for years.
What I know is that the love of God is no cozy, human thing. This love allows for so much death: the death of Abel, whose work was acceptable to the Lord; the death of Job’s children; the death of the firstborn of Egypt; the death Uriah the Hittite; the death of Bathsheba’s first born; the natural deaths of so many patriarchs who passed from life into death, still waiting to see the promises of God fulfilled. The death of John the Baptist. The death of Jesus.
The Christian answer to all this death is that none of it is final. A new, restored world is coming.
Any yet, in this world, God wants to test me, and he will not relent, not yet. He is not human. I am. I will not pretend, any more, to understand his love. It is not the kind of love children pray for. For years, it has not been the kind of love that responds to my prayers, not in the way that he used to. Many days, I long to be loved by the God that hears my cry, that softens for me like he does for all the happy people who talk about testing in the past tense, by a God who shows his mercy and goodness through my weakness, not through his power to shut me in. It has been seven years. I don’t have any news to report.
On days when, despite my waiting and my greying and the silence of the Lord, the sun is shining and the leaves are rustling green and the squirrels outside my decaying apartment are plump, I think not of Job, but of Jacob, who wrestles an angel who is God. They wrestle all night, until God wounds Jacob, dislocating his hip, to make him stop. Before Jacob releases the angel who is God, he demands a blessing. He gets it—a new name, Israel, the one who strives with God, . . . for you have striven with God and with humans and prevailed—and he walks with a limp his whole life.
Sometimes, I tell God I am refusing to surrender. I, too, am wrestling with him until I receive my blessing. I, too, will prevail and return home with a new name.
In the early years of silence, I imagined God would pull a rabbit out of his hat. Suddenly, the gates of heaven would open and my life would be healed and all the waiting would have meaning. I was tested.
But what is waiting, but a wounding by God? I’ve come to believe that there might be a resolution to these years of pain and emptiness, but even if one day I can understand this absence of God, there will still be a scar. I won’t forget that this happened—that God, who promises to walk through the valley of the shadow of death with me, all but vacated my life, for years. That God can leave us and test us and never, never relent. He is God. He lets the people he loves die.
If I think of all my patriarchs, there is wounding. There is the waiting of Abraham and the shaming of Sarah for her laughter. The demand for Isaac’s life. The scarring of Jacob’s hip. The enslavement of Joseph at the hands of his brothers. The enslavement of generations of Israelites in Egypt. For all of them, God shows up, eventually. For none of them is time reversed or erased: Sarah names her long-awaited son he laughs; Abraham is provided a sacrificial ram, but not before he and Isaac and perhaps others know that he would have killed this son in the name of the Lord; Jacob walks with a limp for the rest of his life; the Israelites who lived and died in slavery have still lived and died in slavery.
Even if I could end this essay with a Job-style turn around—God restores Job’s wealth twice over, and gives him more children, and Job lives another 140 years in comfort—I’m not in the business of half-truths for the sake of happy endings. It has been seven years, and I am still waiting. Job’s children still died. The first set were never restored, not on this earth. They died, and they remained dead, and there’s no indication that Job ever stopped missing them, no matter how many more he had, how beautiful his new daughters. To be loved by God is to be wounded by God. Even the resurrected body of Jesus has scars.
On fat squirrel days, I am hopeful for change in my life—in the style of Job or something much, much smaller. Still, I know that even if God does one day relent and provide a way out of this city of disappointment, these wounds will leave scars that no amount of ointment or prayer can conceal. I imagine that one day, when we’re resurrected, we’ll show each other our scars like Jesus showed his hands and torso to the disciples: wounded, healed, marked. Some of our neighbors’ scars we might recognize, having witnessed and maybe even tried to soothe the earthly injury that made them—the broken bone, the severed tendon, the splintered hopes, the bruised heart, the decaying dreams—and so, so many others we’ll have never known were bleeding in ways that only God knew, that only God could have allowed.