We would be Ruth – loyal, faithful, embodying in her sticking with her mother-in-law through thick and thin that virtue of faithfulness which the Hebrew Bible assures us is at the heart of God’s faithfulness to God’s people.

We would be Ruth, in contrast to Naomi – Naomi, bitter, empty, sick in soul, in her pain preferring isolation to the companionship of her daughters-in-law. And yet, there it is still – so often we are more Naomi than Ruth.

Naomi is convinced that she has been abandoned by God. Turning to Ruth and Orpah, trying to persuade them to turn away from her, she tells them that God has turned away from her. “No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.”

And can we blame her for believing the God has abandoned her? When a famine descended on the land of her home, when Bethlehem, in translation “the house of bread”, instead became the house of dry crumbs, Naomi and her husband and two sons became refugees seeking a new start in the land of Moab. But soon her husband dies, and while her two sons both marry, neither marriage produces offspring, and then both sons die. Naomi is now on her own, far from her ancestral community, without means of support, saddled with two daughters-in-law, past the age where marriage and the economic rescue it might provide is a realistic prospect. So can we blame Naomi for believing that God has abandoned her?

Nathan Clair writes of being called to visit a parishioner’s husband in the hospital. The husband had been in a coma for some seven years, following emergency heart surgery, and was sustained only by a feeding tube. Clair made the visit with a pastoral intern. He writes (Weavings, Vol. XXV, Number 1),

When we entered the coma wing, we saw the husband almost immediately. His bed was close to a door away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, but still bathed in natural light. He was a large man, curled up on his side like a child in peaceful sleep. As the intern waited near the foot of the bed, I went to stand at his side, took his hand in mine, and greeted him by name. The easy, natural rise and fall of his breathing was his only response.

Waiting in the quiet with him, my eyes began to take in his surroundings. What most captured my attention was a bulletin board hanging on the wall above his bed. There, in great personal detail, was posted seven years evidence of the tragic loss and deep love felt by this man’s family. From corner to corner, the board was packed with seven years’ worth of cards and photographs. There were school pictures of his grandchildren, favorite photos from the trips I’d heard about, and on every available inch of space there were cards. …most were from his wife with a special note from her inside each one. “I am who I am because of you. I love you” she had written in a card tacked wide open for all to see…..And in those few words written to the man she loved I sensed a quiet, insistent faith -- a faith that would not countenance the idea that the last seven years of coma had stolen anything from her, from them.

Then, after I finished reading the note and moved away from the bulletin board, the intern, with pain and confusion is his voice, asked, “Where is Jesus in this? Where is God in a seven-year coma?”

Where is God in a seven-year coma? Where is God when your husband and sons have died before their times? Where is God when your spouse up and leaves you for someone else, where is God when you have been falsely accused, tried, convicted and sentenced for something you did not and would never do, where is God when on a semester study abroad you visit Nairobi and see that in a city of 4 million a full one-half of the population live in the squalor of immense slums, where is God when despite having been a faithful church-goer for decades that dark night comes when it just seems all to be an empty joke, a delusion, a failed promise?

It is one of the few spiritual certainties in this life that at some point we will experience what seems to be the absence of God. Our prayers, it seems, go unanswered. Our longings for a word from “on high” are met by a deafening silence. The sense we had of a loving, abiding presence vanishes and we wonder if maybe we had just been fooling ourselves all along.

We are tempted to blame ourselves, to tell ourselves that if only we had enough faith, if only we tried harder to believe, if only we were like those giants of the faith, then that absence would not be there at all, then we would know only certainty and the comfort of being freed from the wrestling with doubt. If only we had the faith, say, of Mother Theresa.

And yet, much of the world was shocked when the private writings of the “saint of Calcutta” came out in 2007. Mother Theresa had dedicated her life to alleviating the suffering of the poorest of the poor in one of the most impoverished places on the planet; everything she did she did for Christ, body and soul, sacrificing everything, risking everything, for those the world had discarded as of no worth. Surely, we all assumed, she had a special connection with God, a relationship which fed and sustained her daily, which provided the certainty anyone would require to go to the amazing lengths she did to serve others, to serve God.

Instead, she complained about “this terrible sense of loss – this untold darkness – this continual longing for God – which gives me pain deep down in my heart.” She wrote of how “The place of God in my soul is blank”, that “There is no God in me . . . . I just hear my heart cry out – ‘My God’ and nothing comes back.”

Just as you cannot buy your way into heaven, just as you cannot earn your salvation, no amount of personal saintliness, devotion and effort on your part can guarantee that you will not experience, like Naomi, like Mother Theresa, like people of faith great and small over the ages, what seems to you to be the absence of God. You may be tempted, like Theresa of Avila, to complain “Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”

And yet should we, we proclaimers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, be so surprised? For you remember how the story of the Gospel goes – how at midnight in a backwater village in an out of the way corner of an ancient empire the “son” of God begins human life amid the murderous rampage of a fearful petty tyrant; how this Emmanuel, God-With-Us, took on our human lot, and suffered torture and death on the cross, at the end crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”.

We want a great fixer God, one who will lift us above the fray and struggles of this life, and yet what we get in Jesus Christ is a God who stubbornly refuses to do this, but instead steadfastly stands with us in our common lot, amid all the trials and rejoicing of this life. What we get is not a vanquisher of the darkness, but, as you recall the opening words of the Gospel According to John, a light that shines in the darkness.

And so we are not left alone in the dark night of the soul, even when, especially when, like Naomi we feel we have been abandoned by God. We have those glimpses of lights, perhaps mere refracted shards of light, flashes that hint to us that the darkness is not all in all, that behind the silence is a voice and a presence that is simply light years beyond our mortal graspings and struggles.

Naomi, blinded as she was by her pain and bitterness, has just such a shard of light right beside her. There is her daughter-in-law, Ruth, who instead of abandoning Naomi and returning to her own family of origin, makes that astonishing declaration of solidarity and steadfast loyalty: Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God – yes even this God you believe has turned against you, abandoned you, left you without a hope in the world – your God will be my God.

And there is even such a shard of light in that hospital room with the intern asking in anguish, “Where is God in a seven-year coma?” It is there, plastered all over that bulletin board, packed with a seven-years collection of cards and pictures. It is there, in the radiant glow of the words of his wife of thirty years, “I am who I am because of you. I love you.”

And there may even be shards of light for you in the most unlikely of places. In the Facebook postings of concerned friends; in the unexpected kindness of a total stranger; in the words of a comfort of an old friend at tea; in the mere presence of the old regulars in the pew besides you on Sunday.

The experience of God’s absence can be real, disturbing, confounding, even scary. May we take these experiences not as an invitation to despair, but as an invitation to faith. An invitation to look anew for those flashes of grace which might alert us to a Presence that was there all along. An invitation to listen for the same still, small voice that Elijah finally heard only in the silence. An invitation to continuing on in the journey, ever hopeful that what you seek will be found.

Wherever you go.