The Fourth installment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark 15:34 The first three sayings dealt with forgiveness, happiness and then the birth of community, in that order. This saying or words deal with pure desolation. It is a cry of pain and loneliness. Is it a question without an answer? Is there anything to be said at all?? This is more than the absence of someone whom one loves. Rather, it is the collapse of all meaning, as if the center of your life had been sucked out and you are left hovering over a void......................................................................................................... Few of us will ever have to endure such utter desolation, but there may have been moments when we feared being swallowed by the void, and when our lives appeared to be without sense or meaning because God had gone. In such times proofs of the existence of God are of no great help. Words are rather empty. ................................................................These words quoted above by Jesus come from Psalm 22. He very likely knew it by heart, from memory. Jesus took these words and made them his own. He embraced that experience of desolation and shared it. Even this experience of God's absence is somehow brought within God's own life by going through it. No one can say, then, to God: "you don't know what I am going through." In Jesus God says, "In Him, my son, who is your brother, I have been and am there with you through it all." ......................................................................................... Sometimes we have to be with people who are faced with a suffering that seems pointless, dumb and meaningless. We may have lived such moments ourselves. Someone we love may have faced death by cancer, that they were in the prime of their life, or we may lose a child in an accident and see a loved one early in life become disabled. We may suddenly discovered our lives are ruined physically or financially. Someone may ask us, "why? why? where is God now in all of this?" And we may be very insecure in realizing we have nothing to say to these questions. All the pious words that come to our lips sound worse than empty. All that we can do, then, is to be there, and trust that God is there as well. I have had hints of such and chosen to sit still during my morning prayer saying nothing, thinking nothing, just holding in my hands that were resting in my lap a crucifix that was given me on the day I became a Jesuit (1961) I felt a sense of identification and tried to center myself during a time of terrible, relentless pain from great hurt to my soul. In time, over some days, this helped and I calmed down and regained my emotional and spiritual balance.................................................................................................. I have been with Jesuits from Rwanda who are students at our nearby seminary in Nairobi. One of them when driving me back home from a class shared with me that he had lost all of his family in the 1994 genocide. This pretty well stopped any further conversation between us during that ride back home. This moment in hearing of such a loss for this young priest-to-be reminded of my visiting El Salvador 19 years ago and seeing photos of six Jesuit confreres having their skulls blown wide open after being surprised by soldiers coming to their residence at the University of Central America at 5 in the morning and making them lie face down on the grass of their backyard and take a bullet in the back of their heads. The photos I saw made me hyperventilate and quickly leave the room; I had never before witnessed anything like that nor since. I said later that TV shows that re-enact murders make everything look so anticeptic, so clinical compared to these pictures of horror. They were horrifying and shocked me so suddenly. This is the closest I have gotten to mass killings and monstrous evil. I have heard of others being unable to talk for quite a time after witnessing something like this, and then weep and sob at the stories they heard and the things they saw..................................................... I wonder whether anyone at the cross on the day Jesus died had any similar reaction, either in that moment or in their memories that welled up later and haunted them. To be exposed to something like this makes me be all the more awed by what Jesus embraced in his experience on the cross. In Him God chose to be there for each and all of us when our moment of terrible pain comes and a sense of loneliness overwhelms us and we feel forsaken. What Jesus went through embraced the worst any human can go through, so it seems to me. If one has faith in this kind of God, then one has the assurance of never being forsaken, no matter the suffering, even if one feels forsaken. Bernie Owens