(This is a three-part post. Here is the Introduction. Here is the First Thought.)
The second thought is that God’s attention is elsewhere, on people He likes for some hard-to-fathom reason. And for other inscrutable reasons, He’s not that taken with me. I’m left out in some way. This is the product of a parental figure whom we perceived to be neglectful or absent. This might not have been the parent’s fault. He or she might have been sick, away on military duty, or distanced because of a divorce settlement. But what we internalized is that someone who is supposed to love us unconditionally instead mysteriously ignores us or is absent. We go on dutifully trying to love this inexplicably distant person, and we long for his or her love—for that easy acceptance—but it’s simply not there.
This hampers prayer in predictable ways. We will almost certainly pray with a perfunctory sense of it being the right thing to do. But we suspect that God has more important things to do than to listen to our concerns or to share whatever joys we’ve had today. He might offer me a surprising consolation, a moment of insight and connection, but when He is silent, we resolutely slink back into a kind of self-abnegating obscurity, a sad loneliness, resigning ourselves to the sense that “this is just how things are.”
And again, the good news here is that this set of thoughts is every bit as false as the thought that we can win God’s favor by hard work and never making a mistake. The proof of this is found most directly in Psalm 139 [138]:
O Lord, you search me and you know me,
you know my resting and my rising,
you discern my purpose from afar….
For it was you who created my bring,
knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I thank you for the wonder of my being,
for the wonders of all your creation.
We simply would not exist were it not for God creating us out of love. Each human being is a masterpiece of God’s, however opaque that reality appears at the moment. And each of us, in receiving the life of the risen Christ in baptism, is beheld with special love by God the Father, Who says to us, “Here is my beloved son (or daughter), in whom I am well-pleased.”
This is our battle, a battle to internalize the reality of this love. This is the love that, in Dante’s words, “moves the sun and other stars.” And it is very much meant for you.