This article originally appeared in the Dec. 2009 issue of Weavings, “Where is Your God?” It was edited by John Mogabgab.

A few years ago I was invited by a parishioner to speak with a friend of hers who did not attend our congregation. Her friend’s husband had been in a coma for seven years after emergency heart surgery.

He was being sustained only by a feeding tube and his doctors were talking with his wife about the possible withdrawal of the tube because there had been no sign of improvement for such a long time. Understandably, she was experiencing distress and confusion.

When I met with her, I asked if she had also sought counsel from her own pastor. She responded that she wasn’t seeking pastoral advice from me, just a listening ear from someone who would not push her toward a decision. It became apparent as I listened to her story that while the doctors were talking about ending her husband’s treatment, her pastor and other church members were questioning the strength of her faith and Christian commitment if she even considered letting the doctors do so.

As I sat with her, she tearfully related the tragic account of her husband’s illness, followed by the story of their relationship, their life together, children and grandchildren, favorite trips, and moments when they leaned on each other “to get through.” She ended our conversation by asking if I would visit her husband in the hospital. I agreed, and she then thanked me as we parted ways.

The next day I went to the hospital accompanied by two ministry interns from my congregation. Although I justified their presence as a learning opportunity for them, I knew that I really wanted moral support for what I anticipated would be a difficult visit. When we entered the coma wing, we saw her husband almost immediately. His bed was close to a door away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, but still bathed in natural light. He was a large man, curled up on his side like a child in peaceful sleep. As the interns waited near the foot of his bed, I went to stand at his side, took his hand in mine, and greeted him by name. The easy, natural rise and fall of his breathing was his only response.

Waiting in the quiet with him, my eyes began to take in his surroundings. What most captured my attention was a bulletin board hanging on the wall above his bed. There, in great personal detail, was posted seven-years’ evidence of the tragic loss and deep love felt by this man’s family. From corner to corner, the board was packed with seven years’ worth of cards and photographs. There were school pictures of his grandchildren, favorite photos from the trips I’d heard about, and on every available inch of space there were cards. Card after card after card. Birthday cards. Anniversary cards. Valentine’s Day cards. Get Well cards. Just Thinking of You cards. Some were from his children, some from his grandchildren, but most were from his wife with a special note from her inside each one. “I am who I am because of you. I love you,” she had written in a card tacked wide open for all to read. As I leaned over for a closer look, I suddenly realized: it was that year’s anniversary card celebrating almost thirty years together. And in those few words written to the man she loved I sensed a quiet, insistent faith—a faith that would not countenance the idea that the last seven years of coma had stolen anything from her, from them.

Then, after I finished reading the note and moved away from the bulletin board, one of the interns, with pain and confusion in his voice, asked, “Where is Jesus in this? Where is God in a seven-year coma?

I believe it is one of the spiritual life’s few certainties that, at some time, we will experience the absence of God. We may sense this absence as a personal experience of abandonment, or, like that intern, as a question that arises when we observe the suffering of another. When God seems absent to us, we may come to see only shadow and hear only silence. In the presence of the inescapable and often painful ambiguity of human existence, there has always been a stream of theological reflection in Christian tradition that wrestles with the absence of God.

The Absence is the silent, resounding “No” in which God refuses to give an accounting of God’s Self on our terms and act according to our wishes. In the jarring seasons of God’s absence we encounter a blinding darkness that invites and strangely enables us to see God beyond our images of the Divine. In this way, the experience of God’s absence is an answer to Meister Eckhart’s famous prayer: “I pray God to rid me of God.”[1]

The invitation to look upon God in this way is an invitation to faith. It is in our faithful and faith-filled insistence that God is present, even when we cannot see or hear God, that God is mysteriously made known as present. This faithful and faith-filled resistance to absence is, paradoxically, a witness to the God in whom we live and move and have our being—the God who empowers our resistance when it makes no apparent sense to resist in the first place.

We are neither alone in this insistence nor futilely resisting the fragmenting impact of God’s absence. No, there is One who, in the Incarnation, makes plain in spite of all our anguished ruminations that God will never leave or forsake us. In the person of Christ we meet the Great High Priest who knows our struggles, our pain, our experience of emptiness and abandonment. In Christ, God’s knowledge of us is immeasurably more than an example of divine encyclopedic omniscience. Rather, in Christ, God’s knowledge as Creator transcends itself as God takes our own lives into the intimacy of God’s own life. Jesus Christ, incarnate God and fully human, stands with us looking down from the cross into his own ineffable Self, experiencing the disquieting inscrutability and intimate ubiquity of God’s absence even more terribly than we do.

The solace we lose in the collapse of our false images of God we assuredly regain in the person of Christ, who confirms that God—while beyond all loss and pain—stands with us, knows our circumstances in the deepest way, and will continue to suffer and rejoice alongside us and all of creation in love-filled solidarity. This is the faith of Jesus Christ into which we may be ushered through experiences of God’s absence. It is by this faith that the brokenness of the world is overcome (1 John 5:4), a faith I glimpsed in the words of indomitable love penned by a wounded and yet victorious woman.

I wish I could say that my answers to the intern’s questions that day came easily. I wish I could report that my answers were profound, illuminating, and the perfect balance of pastoral sensibility and theological wisdom. Instead, I stood there admitting that I didn’t have any answers. Yet, I believed then as now that our presence that day was important precisely because we were willing to live with the questions, pressing us to seek after God even in the deep darkness of a seven-year coma. In one dimension, we shared in the heart-breaking, compassionate presence of God that day. In another, we were recipients of a prophetic call to faith expressed in the insistent faith of a grieving spouse. In yet another dimension, we set out on what has become for me a decade-long search into the mysterious contours of God’s absence.

In the gracious disturbance of God’s confounding absence we may hear God whispering, as with Elijah in the deep silence on the mountain (I Kings 19:9-13), offering divine questions in exchange for human ones: Will you still love me? Will you trust me? Will you continue to insist that I Am present in the midst of a seven-year coma—present in your insistence that I Am and in the witness of a vulnerable woman’s faith pinned to a bulletin board full of cards and pictures? Will the brokenness before you and within you cause you to despair or to seek me? For if you seek me with your whole heart, you will find me (Jer. 29:12-14).

[1]Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Co., 1983), 50.