God at the Door

On falling in love after the hardest year of my life

“You have two choices,” said Smokrev. His tone was relaxed and pleasant. "You can run from this room as fast as you can and never look back. But know that we will chase you to the ends of the earth, and there we will eat you alive. The other choice—well, you can do what your emotions prompt you to do—come over here and put your fingers around my neck and choke the life out of me. That's what you want.”

Elijah said nothing.

“Then you will be master,” prompted Smokrev.

Elijah stood up, his face an expressionless mask over a pool of agony. He took a step toward the bed.

“Good, good,” whispered Smokrev, his eyes slitted, his mouth grinning, exposing yellow, gold-filled teeth.

Elijah knelt down beside the bed and reached his hands up to Smokrev's head.

“Do it now. End my wretched existence.”

He took Smokrev's face in his hands, and he kissed him on one cheek, then the other. Deep sighs rushed from the priest's mouth and tears streamed from his eyes. The tears fell on Smokrev's forehead. The old man pulled back in horror.

“Get away from me!” he hissed.

“Can I touch your face?”

“Get away. You are not my Judas,” he screeched.

“No. I am not your Judas.”

“You think you can just go around kissing people! This isn't real! This isn't real!”

Smokrev's eyes were terrified. He pushed the priest away.

Elijah reached out and touched his face. “Shhh, dziecko.”

“Why do you want to touch my face?” Smokrev screamed hoarsely.

“Because I love you.”

Michael D. O’Brien, Father Elijah 312

…

I’m not going to write about the world’s many troubles today.

I don’t feel like it. Though there are plenty to dissect, as you well know. If history’s chess, you will from time to time be amazed by the enemy’s play. The devil is an immortal intellect, after all; against it, no human can possibly compete.

There’s just one problem: the devil isn’t playing against humanity. It’s playing against God.

2024 was the hardest year of my life. I’ve heard the same thing from some of you, and if that’s you, too, then you know that to live through a crisis is to have some part of life turn rabidly against you: your body, your family, your city, your marriage, your money. For me it was my mind. I thought I was losing it. I remember reading Jean-Dominique Bauby’s experience of locked-in syndrome in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, how he was confined in a bed “like a hermit crab dug into his rock.” That is a visceral image. It is impossible not to feel the smallness of the crab and the weight of unfeeling stone. For me it was backwards: My body was well. Better than that. I was abundantly ok. But something was happening in my mind I could not understand.

A stroke, maybe? It turned out no. Something generational? No. Iniquity? Not that. Burnout? Not really, nor a midlife crisis come early either. Until you have some arena in your life go sideways, you don’t know what it’s like to be that woman who loses the coin, to hunt the world like your life depends on it.

It started in December 2023: God left.

It’s one thing to understand the Modern worldview, to recognize the whole “consciousness is consciousness of loss” idea Romantic poets use to get laid. It’s another thing to have oblivion stream in your eyeballs, to live with such a physical sense of annihilation you can’t string two thoughts together, you can’t write, you get to the back of Costco and barely know where you are. You snuggle your kids, you sing the lullabies, but the words are coming apart. My head hurt.

Someday I may write a book about such things. I have pages and pages of notes—scrivenings, would be the word. (“The problem,” says one of the more coherent ones, “is that you cannot convince yourself that you were sane before the crisis began. Pain steamrolls innocence, but innocence isn’t error, and exposure is not revelation.” “The devil doesn’t like pain on its own,” says another, scribbled on the edge of my bed. “The enemy likes cynicism, isolation, and above all else bafflement.”)

Then in January a dear friend died. I was in Texas when I got the text. There’s been an accident, it said. Call me.

“Two of the five men who stood in your wedding have departed this earth,” my brother later observed. “Who does that happen to, at your age?” I admit sometimes the cast of my life seems thin.

Other things happened. I won’t include them. We all tune out—I tune out—eventually. The difference between ten casualties and ten thousand is how much attention we have to spare.

Of course, we tried everything. For my mind. Prayer. Counseling. Spiritual direction. Nutrition. We sought diverse medical input. I got serious about weightlifting and put on ten pounds of muscle. I prayed like Rees Howells and saw God do His incredible things. But it was all happening so very far away. In fact it seemed not to be happening at all. Those images are less substantial than a fistful of ashes. A friend of mine lives with a permanent background of physical pain, and though she never mentions it, it’s there in every expression. Where exactly is hard to say, but there is a fine, almost origami quality to her motions of sadness and joy.

A mind can be like that. My wife and I came up with a psychological pain scale. “At a ten,” she said, “we’re taking you to the hospital.”

“I’m at a nine,” I told her, too often. I didn’t want to go to the hospital.

And besides, I couldn’t go, because Em got sick. For months she was in bed. “I don’t remember what we did last winter,” I told her, not long ago.

“We didn’t do anything,” she gently explained.

It turned out we were pregnant. In our story, that is an occasion of almost paralyzing fear but, on the other hand, pregnancy gilded Em’s illness somewhat. During our previous pregnancy, the one that ended with a near-fatal miscarriage, Em had no symptoms whatsoever. Winter passed. Spring passed. Summer was galloping by. Finally a friend put me in contact with two saints, a couple in their eighties who specialize in warfare prayer for extreme cases. They agreed to see me, and after two days of prayer together my mind was fine.

Fine.

What an understated word.

I am fine like Armageddon was a false alarm. You unbar the bunker door, you turn out the lights, you are welcome to get on with your life and by the way it’s May.

It is such a strange thing.

Most of my friends got married a decade ago and so by now I’ve seen several marriages go Chernobyl and others grow bitterly, almost excruciatingly, cold.

But I’ve also seen some of those warm up again and some of those couples remarry. One in particular: After ship-wrecking his life, a man I knew suddenly changed. I say suddenly. It wasn’t like that—for a long time God was after him. But in the end he transformed. He showed up for his kids. He was kind to his former wife. He listened in a way only the resurrected can. At last, he dropped by her house. It was one of those glorious spring days, when the earth soda-blasts your face with freshness and daffodils sing like penny whistles. At the door he asked her a question. “Would you like to go to dinner with me?”

To her surprise, she did.

Sometimes it’s like that with Jesus. The truck pulls up. The door creaks open. Behind the wheel, there’s an old familiar face, only in this case it’s God.

I’ve told friends that after a long, hard season, God and I are rebuilding. But it’s not like that. It’s not moving bricks. It’s tender.

When fall came I felt drawn—compelled—to work the lunch shift at the Rescue Mission downtown, and so on Tuesdays that’s what I do. I knew it would be meaningful but I didn’t expect to feel it. Life desensitizes, after all. We lose and do not necessarily regain a little compassion for every wounded eye we see. And since that’s so it’s shocking when the opposite occurs, when feeling creeps back in like blood bleeding into your veins and you see all those lean hungry faces and love them.

I was down there one day, peeling carrots. To my surprise God softly spoke. “What do you think of this?” He asked.

I looked up. There was James (not his real name): black sunglasses, cleaving potatoes. He’s down to a pack a day, he’s ready to work, at the cutting board he makes a noise like Bunker Hill. By him, that’s Sarah (not her name either). I don’t know where she sleeps but in the kitchen she is omniscient. Make a mistake, slam the door to the ice machine, and you’ll hear about it. There are a hundred people like that. I find myself wondering—because it is almost impossible not to wonder—who loves them, and if anywhere the porch lights are burning.

“What do you think?” God asked. It was a soft voice, like always, but there was more. Almost, it seemed to me, He sounded shy.

And then I realized: You love this, God. Here, in the middle of need, Your heart is exposed. And you want to know what I think of the things you love.

“I love this,” I told Him, and that’s true.

Sometimes God shows you the splendor of the world. Other times He speaks through beauty. But other times He shows you His heart directly, and when He does it is almost romantic, because isn’t that how romance goes: You visit your beloved’s hometown, the creeks, the unbeguiling strip malls, the same cinderblock high school, only in this case it’s her school, and those are her memories lined up in orange basketball jerseys for me to reject or receive.

It’s not that we haven’t done this before—it’s that we have and since we have the stakes are raised by many degrees.

God doesn’t like rejection any more than you do. And yet He is the most unguarded lover in the universe. He writes poetry. He buys the big box of chocolates—the one that says Be Mine Forever, and He doesn’t drop it off. He stands there, ding-dong, then waiting, and He doesn’t care how much the traffic slows down.

How does God do that? He admits in detail all the things He loves, and I can tell you who that is: God loves people, and He loves this whole blood-smeared God-shot glorious world.

Believe me, it’s one thing to know that, but it’s another to have God bring them by, one after another, like a parade of treasures.

There’s a 16 year-old who’s slipped through the cracks of the foster system into a kind of protectionless limbo. Em and I met her months ago: blondish, vaping, sweet in spite of everything. Like all traumatized kids she reads like an adult but is not. We meet a lot of kids like that. But this time we realized we wanted to adopt her. Were crying to adopt her. That will almost certainly turn out to be impossible. Even so, to feel and to pray with what amounts to a nickel-sized slice of all-encompassing love is something new.

Not long ago a woman got out of prison. We heard about her, we heard she needed a car, and when Emilie and John Mark (the monkish artist who lives downstairs) and I circled up to pray there was no question we’d give her one of ours—the only question was whose.

At the grocery store there’s this stocker, Amanda. She dresses like a cabbage patch kid, and as Em and I have gotten to know her she’s opened up about her life. How hard marriage can be. How much you can love a son. How you hope he doesn’t hear you fighting. When we talk, I want to tell her about a desire she does not understand, which is the whole aching desire of God to be near. And so I do. I tell her love is the meaning of life, and that she was made by Love for Love, not generally, but Love in particular: the Love all of us know and recognize long before we learn His name.

Sometimes I don’t know how He takes it. To love is to suffer, after all, and we know only in passing what God experiences all the time. When I think about my friends who’ve lost faith and fled, prodigal-style, into the world’s least caring places I cannot help but cry. There is a despair, an appalling loneliness, you will only find apart from God’s presence.

But then there is that awesome fact French mystic Simone Weil described. “It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,” she said, “in order to find reality through suffering.”

That is one of those blistering facts that can give a life new orientation, and like all such facts it flows from God. Grief burdens His heart, sure, but that grief flows from an original joy, a hallelujah before all ages. When the ages we recognize are gone, that hallelujah will remain. What are these solitary afflictions beside a joy of that magnitude?

“I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence,” wrote poet Christian Wiman, “and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love.”

Ah. Yes.

What I am experiencing now is not a secret. The saints figure it out and in a hundred ways they share that secret with the world. “By love he can be caught and held,” explains the author of The Cloud, “by thinking, never.”

“All shall be well,” wrote Julian of Norwich, and you can almost hear her old voice straining to fill that fathomless first word. All.

“To believe in God,” wrote Kallistos Ware, “is not to accept the possibility of his existence because it has been ‘proved’ to us by some theoretical argument, but it is to put our trust in One whom we know and love. Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.”

In case that’s unclear, here it is in plain language: God does not share His heart with anyone to save the world.

He did not fill John Bosco with love for orphans to give orphans a home. He did not give Rees Howells a heart for the homeless so a few Welsh vagrants could have a suit and a job, and He didn’t make Genevieve an intercessor because God loves Paris more than other places.

Resurrections like that are a happy result, yes. But they are a secondary result.

God shares His love in hopes that we will love Him, that we will walk with him down Maple Street in the springtime talking about anything but feeling all the time the expansion and the homecoming, the extension of the horizon and the oncoming shore, the strangeness and the familiarity that is for couples perhaps the greatest and most delicious mystery of love.

And I do. I do.

There are people, they say, who are so hungry the only way they can hear God’s voice is through food. If that’s true—and it is—it is also true that there people so thoroughly baffled, so depressed, so undone, they can’t hear God’s voice at all.

And yet God sustains them. They are like patients lying in a coma so deep no doctor hopes for them and yet God will not pull the plug: He gives another breath, another breath, another breath, another day, another day, another day, always hoping that maybe today, maybe today, maybe today their eyes will suddenly blink open, and they’ll see Him, and know.

Maybe that’s you.

As I’m writing this it’s Advent.

Of course it’s Advent.

I love everything about this season: the lights, the pine needles, the peppermint. I love the readings from the Prophets and the stirring Collects. And yet it’s easy, it’s always easy, to miss the drama, the extravagance of these Sundays that roll in, one after another, like declarations of war. Hope, the first Sunday declares. Peace, says the second. Joy, says the third.

Of course, these point somewhere, and if you’ve been paying attention that somewhere will not be a surprise. When the fourth Sunday comes it comes like a trumpet blast, like a horn, as the Anglo-Saxons would put it, speaking its war word. What word?

Love, of course. Love.

My goodness. I love this God. I love this Jesus. He is so unabashed. Plucky, would be the word, if pluck could plunder the grave and make galaxies spin like pinwheels.

The other day Zion and I were down at the transitional house. It’s square, very neat, with a small backyard. We were there to plan a garden because—why else?—that is what their Father wants them to have: roses. He wants them to have a place to sit in the evening and remember that yes, life is cruel, but not only cruel, and unkind, but not only unkind, because there is a compassion that still sits by these women at night and holds their hand in the midst of the nightmares.

And I know that because he sat by me through the nightmare, through the whole pitch black year: white knuckling it on the edge of the bed, praying, crying, announcing a verdict I could not hear then but know now was Live.