I’ve been reading “Death on a Friday Afternoon”, by Father Richard John Neuhaus, this Lent, and I wanted to share one of his very insightful thoughts.

The book is a reflection on the 7 last “words’ of Jesus on the Cross, which include “It is finished” and “Behold your son; behold your mother”. On the chapter entitled Dereliction, he speaks of how we humans try to escape from the fact that we are creatures (created by God) and make ourselves our own gods:

Our gnostic consciousness-raising flights, our attunement to “the inner child”, our following of our bliss, our pious sensations of at-one-ness with the All–these are soaring escapes from our creatureliness. We are not little sparks of the Divine who have by some cosmic mishap fallen into the mud and matter of creation. We are the very stuff of creation. We are not God.

Yes! I realized back about 7 years ago when I had to truly face my atheism that I am not God. It was a painful but liberating realization, and my life since then has been a continual effort to become recentered on Jesus Christ, who is God.

However, on the Cross, Jesus cried out asking God why He had forsaken him.

As with the creature on the cross, we cry out to God. In the act of perfect obedience to God is this experienced distance from God. The great mystics of the Christian tradition understood this well, painfully well. The nearer we come to God, the more we become “similar” to him, the more we are astonished by the infinite dissimilarity. The more we know him, the less we know him. Those who toy with the sundry “spiritualities” offered in the religious marketplace know nothing of this….And so we read: “At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole earth until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus screamed with a loud cry, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?“

I recommend the book, especially as a good Lenten preparation for Easter. At times, I feel like he is going on a bit too long or digressing because he writes in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, but more often I am really drawn in and keep reading page after page.