“Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me groaning.”

John of the Cross in The Spiritual Canticle

It has fascinated me that John of the cross wrote this beautiful poem while imprisoned in a tiny dark cell where three days a week they brought him into middle of the dining room where he had to eat kneeling on the floor.. They also beat him three times a week. Those wounds were bad enough that they took years to heal.

In a way St. John teaches us by this long beautiful prayer that the place within where not everything is all right, where you feel wounded, that it’s the place to go for prayer.

As I was going to write more about this, we received news that there is political turmoil in Madagascar where we have many friends. Everything is closed, government, schools, stores. And it is dangerous to go out. So our friends are stuck in their homes.

And that is sometimes how we feel about our own inner ache or confusion or sorrow. It is then and there that we have the opportunity to turn to God in faith. To act in our prayer with faith no matter how we may feel. And when we hear news like this we know that whatever ache or sorrow or confusion we may have, it is not a private affair. It is always joined to the cries of Jesus on the Cross. While Jesus cries out My God, My God why have you forsaken me, following that he says a word of comfort to the good thief, and a word of great trust: Into your hands I commend my spirit.

This is a good way of prayer then: to feel our way to the wound that is in us, (in case we have the insight to discover that place) to the place of our need, - to go there and hold our need before the Lord.

And always to remember that Jesus rose from the dead. We live in hope, we walk by faith, we trust in the love God has for us.