Words about deep suicidal depression, or the Night of the Spirit, and how to overcome, escape, or
understand it, seem only words. No one has been equal to describe such horror, like handing an empty glass to someone dying of thirst. But we may try, and not judge negatively those who try.
God makes the initial move. Only He can give that Love, He IS that Love: love which has no beginning, no
limit, and no cause. Incomprehensible by a created mind. I like the image of Jesus coming through the
locked door; I could not represent it in a painting or sculpture, only modern photography could make some
semblance of this look real by using diapositives.
No doubt we can shut Him out. We do it. He doesn't knock the door down violently He simply comes
gently through it, as and when He wills. God is shut out, too, by others: from our "private" mind: by parents, school, the media.
What first brought about the separation of man from God, and locked Him out? Disobedience. Since the
time of Adam, only one human being has at every moment obeyed God: the Blessed Virgin Mary. All others have disobeyed. When He as her Son said goodbye to her from the Cross (John 19:26), Mary began to feel a certain separation from Him, as though He had left and closed the door, which perhaps lasted until her
Dormition and Assumption: horrendous suffering. But we are not told that. Most prefer to think He
reappeared to her after His resurrection...We don’t know. But that may be part of the way that she is the
co-remptrix. She experienced the losd of God, until she had "fallen asleep" into His eternal embrace.
When on the Cross Jesus cried out, "My God! My God! Why have You abandoned me?" He took upon
Himself, along with all our other sins, the sin of Atheism. That is hell.
The first of the Luminous mysteries of the Rosary recalls His baptism by John in the River Jordan, when He was symbolically plunged into the fallen human condition.
Could He, with his free will, choose to disobey God, His Father, who is Infinite Good, Infinite Love? It is a mystery, but we have to reply in the negative. His humanity's "hypostatic union" with God the Son means that even his humanity belonged to God, was possessed by the Infinite Love and Wisdom which always and
eternally chooses to love the Good.
We do not, always. “We is all sinners.”
But could He EXPERIENCE the feeling, the state and condition of being Godless, rebelling, let us say its
"side effects"? I answer affirmatively.
How can He who is Light experience darkness? He who is Life, die? Dying is horrible, I came close the
other day. Yes, He can plunge into all that filth, like into the Jordan, making it His own. He died, didn't He? Satan thought so, and he was right for once.
He brought the disobedient nature into obedience, even to the death sentence. He overcame death: brought
the mortal nature into union with the immortality of Him who is the Immortal, the Strong, the Holy One.
Figuratively He washed off all our private and public sins, washed them all clean not only in the Jordan but in His own Blood. No one else has shed every drop of his blood and come back to life. What we drink in the
chalice is alive in His risen body.
He paid the ultimate price for sin: death. He re-deemed it. In Latin the word means re-bought, bought it back===from Satan, who was really mad. It left him (Satan) with nothing, He would have to fight for it all over
again, try to get it back. He cheats. I doubt he gets much. Jesus is all-mighty. He didn't go through that for
nothing.
Not BACK to hell. Jesus' abandonment was experience of separation from God. I used to think it was the
experience of only a moment. He breathed out His spirit, committed His soul to His Father (who He felt had left Him), and the body died, which is assured by the centurion's lance in His side --whereupon the centurion expresses his act of Faith, but we are not told in the Gospel much. It is not revealed if anything went on in
Jesus' SOUL after the expiration of His body. The statement in the Apostles' Creed that He "descended into hell" lends itself to the belief that the feeling of "abandonment" was not momentary in the Divine Soul, who
took it with Him into the realm of the dead beyond our vision, but not our imagination or our faith.
I think that the experience of abandonment by God mysteriously took the sin of atheism, of the atheists, into his redemptive action, so that He could save the atheists at well as all other sinners.
Anyway, how deliberately is atheism committed? IT LEAVES ONE LONELY, BUT CULPABLY SO? Some may adhere to it as if it were a sad truth. They share in Christ's abandonment, and He is present in theirs, mysteriously of course.
It moves me away from judging atheists negatively. Had I had their experience, been in their shoes and
classrooms as a child, would I be a believer?
Catholicism is true Love of the true God, from which it gets its joy. Can atheists see that? Do they find that in their history books, or their Catholic neighbors? Or do they reject what is actually a lie or a distortion?
I think that in Holy Week we might spend Holy Saturday contemplating the suffering and hell of Godlessness.
--Dom Julian Stead, OSB, Spiritual Advisor to the Confraternity of Penitents and Retired Visitor of the CFP
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