God in the middle

"So where is God in the middle of all this?" asked the spiritual director I went to see for the first time today. "All this" includes my move to Massachusetts three months ago to start a new job and be closer to my Dad who lives in Hartford. It also includes my living apart from my partner, who is still in our old house, which we planned to sell and buy a house in Massachusetts, my anxiety about my new job and about being separated from my partner, my worry over my aging and declining father, and so forth.

"I don't know," I said,  "but I know that God is in the middle of it, because lately the lessons and hymns in church seem chosen especially for me." This is one of the ways I can tell that I'm dealing with what I euphemistically call an "opportunity for growth." Also, I have been forced by loneliness and anxiety to reach for the nearest source of support -- my church and the friends there. It is a fact that God does not play fair -- s/he will get you when you're down, because that's when you're most likely to let God in. And once you do, s/he won't ever let go, give up, go away, leave you alone.

You see, God views every single part of creation (including bugs, Yankees fans and Republicans) as God's own and s/he loves all of it, every bit. And what do you want to do with someone you love? You want to get close to them, physically and emotionally. You want to have them trust you and you want them to grow to their fullest potential. And for all of that to happen, you have to attend to your relationship. So when there's an opening in a vulnerable human heart, God is right there, offering us love and a way live with open hearts. And if we're vulnerable enough, we might just forget to be wary and accept God's offer.

And once we do that, we can never completely go back to our old ways. Once you have heard God speak your name and promise to be with you whatever happens, you can never not know that you belong to God again. You can be miserable, cold, lonely and afraid, but you can never forget that God has touched your life.

Perhaps the truest idea we have of God is as The Friend, the one who is there when you are at your lowest and who rejoices with you when life is sweet. I like to remember the line from "Fiddler on the Roof" that says "God would like us to be joyful even when our hearts lie panting on the floor." Yes, even then, because life itself is a blessing.

And one of the gifts of hard times is the way they can soften our hearts -- towards ourselves and others too. As Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye says in her poem, "Kindness," "Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing." The lesson of suffering is that everybody hurts -- everybody. And the only thing that really helps is to reach out to another hurting person.

As hard as I try to protect myself from pain, I can't avoid it. I can only embrace it or not. Embracing pain, and using it to connect with others, is the way of life, and the way of blessing.