Pursuing Presence in Isolation (Pt. 3)
“COMMUNION WITH GOD”
We are people caught in the in-between, in this uncomfortable space sandwiched between what was lost and love made whole. Heaviness lingers here, and we must let it.
Because our ache tells a story.
In his last hours, Jesus was filled with sorrow.1 But his grief was not that he was mistreated and misunderstood or that he would bear the brunt of our sins, but that in doing these things, to make love complete, he must be separated from the Father.2 As horrible and unjust as his death was, Jesus knew that the worst end was not death, disease, or dismemberment, but any existence without God.
But he did it anyway. Jesus stepped out of God’s presence so that we might have full access to it. The time between the cross and the empty tomb was not about the eradication of sin so that we might be shiny, but about removing the barriers between us and God—of increasing grace not as the goal itself but as the means to life in the presence of a holy God—right here, now.
Grace is our access, not our end.
Humanity didn’t need a bandaid, but a sacred communion with the Divine. We are creatures intended to walk WITH God on this earth, to carry him not only in our souls or our minds but also in our bodies, our beings, our words, and our endeavors.3 The bread and the wine are not to be reduced only to a symbol of Jesus’ last act with his disciples or a way for us to remember his suffering, but embraced as a way of life—of daily communion between our earthly flesh and the Emmanuel God.
Our every longing, every moment of restless discontent that we can feel down in our toes, points to our need for a life flavored by this presence with God and with each other.4
When our souls groan from the weight of being human, from the reality of what Jesus did, may we use this occasion to take advantage of our grace-filled access. To draw near to God, to cry out, to sit in silence and acknowledge our longing. To remember all that God has done. To “think of God the most [we] can” as a “small but holy exercise” that ushers us into his presence and reshapes our view of suffering from penance to an “effect of His mercy.”5
Here in the in-between is where grace reaches across the abyss and beckons us, “Come near...”
NOTES
1 - Matthew 26:36-38
2 - Matthew 27:46
3 - In her book This Too Shall Last, K.J. Ramsey writes, “We elevate our thinking capacity over the truth of our embodied, relational existence, and in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the grace of learning love through one another. […] Faith is formation for our whole selves.”
4 - Matthew 22:37-39
5 - Words from Brother Lawrence, published in The Practice of the Presence of God (letters three and eleven).
