“One of the hardest lessons to learn spiritually is that God’s silence is not the same thing as God’s absence. God can be present with us despite the fact that God might not be communicating directly to us, perhaps because it is too early for us to know something, or perhaps because we’re not yet the people who can receive the message that God wants to give. And the only way to acquire the capacity to receive it is to live through something, endure through something and have (God’s influence) help us have the capacities to be able to receive what God has to give.” (from an interview with literary scholar Mathew Wickman about his book Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor).
A few years ago, I was struggling with chronic pain that was medically difficult to treat and that put a damper on my outlook on life. I'm someone who prays and values cultivating spiritual experiences. Taking time to commune with God and seek divine help and guidance is important to me. For three years, I struggled to feel any spiritual inspiration, comfort or connection with God about the pain I was going through and what I could do to heal. Had God abandoned me? Did they not care about my pain and anguish? I wrestled with doubt and fear. After three years, without me doing anything differently that I was aware of, inspiration and healing broke through. I had spiritual experiences that allowed me to feel God's compassion for my suffering, and I accessed inspiration about how to move forward.
Recently, I came across the words quoted above which are by Mathew Wickman, a favorite English professor of mine. His insights helped me to reframe my experience. I recently found a journal I kept during the period I was struggling to connect with God on my pressing issue. It was just a little notebook I bought at the dollar store and that I had actually forgotten about it. Yet inside were entries that now showed up like a sacred book of personal scripture. I realized while reading my journal that God hadn't abandoned me at all. During that period, my daily life had actually been full of moments of spiritual meaning, comfort, insight and dreams for a better future that I had not fully appreciated at the time or remembered. Just because God was silent on one difficult topic, the thing I was most worried about, hadn't meant I was rejected or cut off spiritually. I don't know exactly why God was silent about that during those years, perhaps I wasn't ready to understand what I needed to heal or to change my perceptions of my life and my pain. Moving forward, I am choosing to trust that as I persist in my religious and spiritual practices, even when there are times of seeming silence, frustration and difficulty, in the long run, I will foster spiritual experiences that will help me to find spiritual meanings, purpose and healing in my life. I trust that God is with me even in seeming silence.
