But, how can God abandon us when God is in a relationship with us, a relationship so dear and precious that Jesus tells us that God is our Parent and Jesus is our brother? Can a true Parent, loving in every sense of the word, ever abandon his or her child?
Jesus' last words to his friends at his Last Supper (John: chapters 14,15, and 16) comfort us and encourage us: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God and faith in me....I will not leave you orphaned." How can this be true, when Jesus will suffer, die, rise, and then return to His Father in Heaven? It's true because Jesus' great gift to us is to show us that he and the Father are one, and, if the Father never leaves Jesus, then our mutual Father can and will never leave us alone as orphans.
Jesus' Father is also our Father: when the risen Jesus speaks to Mary of Magdala, he says "Go to my brothers and tell them 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Whenever Jesus speaks about God the Father, he tells us that he is always with the Father: "I can never be alone; the Father is with me." (John 16:32) and this is God the Father Who is also OUR Father! We also can never be orphans: our Father is always, always, with us.
God our Father is always speaking to us; all we have to do is to be attentive to God's Voice. One echo of God's Voice today is the great mystic Julian of Norwich, who lived in a time in history which is eerily reminiscent of ours: Here is how author, scholar, and Episcopal priest Mary Earle describes Julian’s fourteenth-century context:
"Julian lived at a time of vast social, [religious,] and political upheaval, incessant wars, and sweeping epidemics. Norwich, with a population of around 25,000 by 1330 . . . was struck viciously by the plague known as the Black Death. At its peak in the late 1340s in England, it killed approximately three-fourths of the population of Norwich. A young girl at this time, Julian was certainly affected in untold ways by this devastation. When the plague returned, she was about nineteen. . . . [1]
Yet, even in the midst of all this suffering, Julian does not speak of a wrathful, avenging God Who has sent a great flood of illness and war to punish human beings. Instead, "Again, and again, Julian reassures each one of us that we are loved by God, unconditionally. In her writings, we hear Christ telling us, just as he told Julian, “I love you and you love me, and our love shall never be separated in two.” [1] If we live IN Christ and Christ lives IN us, then we can never be separated from Christ or from his Father Who is OUR Father.
Some of Jesus' most beautiful words to his friends - and to us - at his Last supper are these: "On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you." (John 14:20) Jesus is reminding us that God is so close to us that we live inside God - in Him we live and move and have our being - and simultaneously God lives inside us.
Julian reassures us "The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. . . . And the soul who contemplates this is made like [the one] who is contemplated."
Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us that belief in humans' union with God "has been the enduring message of every great religion in history. It is the Perennial Tradition. Divine and thus universal union is still the core message and promise—the whole goal and the entire point of all religion."
Lady Julian of Norwich uses the idea of “oneing” to describe divine union. In chapter 53 of Revelations of Divine Love, she writes, “This beloved soul was preciously knitted to God in its making, by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is oned in God. In this oneing, it is made endlessly holy. Furthermore, God wants us to know that all the souls which will be saved in heaven without end are knit in this knot, and oned in this oneing, and made holy in this holiness.” [1]
If we look carefully at a knit shawl or muffler or glove, we see that it is a whole piece - we cannot see any divisions in it. We couldn't say "This piece is God and this piece is me, and here is where we are joined together."
And all souls which will be saved are also knit together and are one with God and us - how amazing! United in God, we human beings truly are all one family.
In Julian's day, a lot of the popular art depicted the artists' ideas of the Last Judgement, of damned souls writhing in agony. So many popular religious speakers spoke of the wrath of God, and people who were suffering despairingly asked "God, why me? How can you punish me this way?"
But Julian did not believe in a wrathful, avenging God. She looked at people's hearts and souls and saw that human beings can be wrathful, go to war, ignore people who are suffering, exact inhumane punishments on wrongdoers. But that is the work and "mind-set"of human beings, not of God. We could add that today we understand that God allows nature to evolve as it wills, and also allows human beings to take responsibility for the world and all its creatures and experience the effects of not caring for our common home.
"Julian’s radical insistence that we know there is “no anger in God” [2] directs us all to look at ways in which we project our own bitterness, anger, and vengeance upon God. In a resolutely maternal way, she encourages us to grow up, to cast aside our immature and punitive images of God, and to be honest with ourselves about our own actions that have their roots in spiritual blindness. . . .Julian tells us, again and again, in a variety of ways, that God is our friend, our mother and our father, as close to us as the clothing we wear."
Today, Pope Francis asks us to remember that, if God loves all of us, we are all called to love one another as one family under the protection and leadership of one Father. He says,
"Today in the world, there is a great feeling of being orphaned: many have many things, but the Father is missing. And this is repeated in the history of mankind: when the Father is missing, something is missing and there is always a desire to find, to rediscover the Father... always looking for the missing Father. Today we can say that we live in a society where the Father is missing, a sense of being orphans that affects one’s belonging and fraternity. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to remind us always, always, how to access the Father, to remind us that we have a Father. And to this civilization that has a huge sense of being orphaned, may He grant the grace of finding the Father once again, the Father who provides everyone with a sense of meaning in life. May He make all men and women one family.”
Truly, if we believe in our hearts that we are in relationship with a God Who loves us unconditionally, we will trust that, even if we feel as if we are almost drowning in the flood waters of life, that we are clinging alone to a piece of wreckage to stay afloat, we still can always pray and say "You, God, will reach down from Heaven and rescue me; You will draw me out of the deep waters of this flood."