The Noon-Day Demon: When God is Gone

“And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died”      Don Mclean

Dejection and despair are what is left when hope and trust leave. They are what the absence of God feels like.

One of the darkest, saddest things a human will experience is the descent into dejection and despair that comes when one comes to believe they are utterly alone. What follows is the delusion that everything depends on their innate ability to manage their life and perform well. An impossible task for mere mortals.

I was in my forties when I felt the absence of God. It was as if whatever was holding me up through the vicissitudes of life had fallen away, leaving me shaken, beat down, and floundering. All I thought I knew did not matter. All I had depended upon had left. I was on my own, looking around at a mess I mostly created but had no way to straighten out.

It was not always that way. I had long been a lover of God and a believer in miracles. I believed in, and constantly felt a depth of love and care emanating from somewhere I didn’t know, whether it came from the cosmos, or sprang up from within me—but it was there, as real to me as this chair I am sitting in. My life was punctuated with activities and people who supported a similar ineffable trust.

When the conscious presence of a benevolent Supreme Being that has carried one for years fades away, it feels like a free fall into an abyss. One is left alone to face the perils of the world.

This loss is not as uncommon as one may think. In my years of working with addicts in recovery, I hear over and over again the story of how faith and trust and a tangible spiritual connection evaporates in the face of life’s distractions, disappointments, and griefs. An inner cynicism toward the immaterial (spiritual) world displaces hope and trust. God seems gone.

In the third century, the Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of Christianity, and established it as a legitimate means of spiritual expression. Martyrdom ended, but so did the radical fire and energy associated with being associated with a persecuted religious sect. Disenchanted with a national, secularized Christianity, men and woman, fled Europe to the Northern desert of Egypt to pursue a life of semi-solitude and a self-martyrdom from the world. They wanted more. They wanted the fire to return.

As these communities of semi-solitudes formed, so did the danger of spiritual boredom and lethargy—called “Acedia: The Noon-Day Demon”. This name came from the sense of a static turbid lethargy, as if the sun had stopped directly above, leaving one stuck in a forever-moment of dejection, boredom, and meaninglessness. Some became spiritually and mentally neurotic.

No longer challenged by an empire bent on the destruction of your faith and values, the spiritual life would for some loose it’s attraction.  Acedia, considered a spiritually lethal malady, would set in slowly and imperceptibly. This spiritual sickness was what the desert fathers and mothers constantly warned against.

Acadia is the loss of desire for things of God, for things of the spirit. It is that loss of faith and trust, and of hope. The very things that can bring you back from Acadia are also the very things you have come to abhor— prayer, spiritual reading, companionship with others who value the same spiritual life. It is similar to one who suffers depression, where the remedy— making connections with others and getting involved with things outside yourself, is the very thing one has come to despise to begin with.

To have been on fire for life, for God, with God—to have once been happy and joyous with the excitement of life—to walk around this life with a tangible sense of the presence of God—to have once been confident that no matter what, you will be cared for and so will those in your care—and have it all fade away—this is the ultimate disappointment. This is dejection. This is spiritual despair, which over time becomes a sort of spiritual coma. This is Acedia. This is the noon-day demon that comes upon so many of us at some point during our lives.

Yet, there is always hope. As long as there is breath, there is hope.

St. Theresa of Calcutta (Mother Theresa) in her journals records a very long span of time later in her life where she no longer felt the presence of God and the calling that she once so clearly hears as a young nun. She persisted in her work for the poorest of the poor dying on the streets of Calcutta, but felt none of the joy and love God she once knew. While this astounded many, to many others the experience rang true. It is common among seekers to experience the presence of God as ebbing and flowing, coming and going, fading and appearing—and sometimes, like Mother Theresa, the fading and leaving is for extended lengths of time.

What I know, looking back, is that the very felt absence of God is the sign of his presence. Anger and frustration at God is the surest sign that I believe. When I railed at God for seemingly abandoning me, I was declaring his existence and involvement in my life.

Jesus was hung on the cross at noon. I imagine the very pain of crucifixion caused him to feel the sun had stopped in his own forever moment.  With just moments left to live, he must have felt the noon day demon himself.  He was heard muttering “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me”.  The ultimate abandonment -a father leaving his son alone to die a death the father led him to, and that the son willingly accepted.

Yet, it is wrong to conclude that Jesus died in despair.  Jesus, with his last breath, was quoting a scripture he had memorized as a young boy raised in a devoutly Jewish home. The psalm Jesus recites to himself on the cross begins with dejection and despair, but ends with hope and trust:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

Why are You so far from saving me,

so far from my words of groaning?

I cry out by day, O my God,

but You do not answer,

and by night,

but I have no rest.

Yet You are holy,

enthroned on the praises of Israel.

In You our fathers trusted;

they trusted and You delivered them.

They cried out to You and were set free;

they trusted in You and were not disappointed.

Some years ago, I was driven by pain and anguish and loneliness to the psalms—when the God of love and care I grew up with seemed but a distant memory.

I would have lost heart, unless I had believed

That I would see the goodness of the Lord

In the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord;

Be strong, and take heart,

And He shall strengthen your heart;

Wait, I say, on the Lord!          PS 23:11

 I had lost heart. I was in despair—for a while. But something was awakened within me as I read this psalm. I was given the “gift of desperation” which somehow opened me again to hope—to the belief that the story has not yet concluded—that there was much more to be written.

To “Take Heart” is to regain your hope, your faith, and your reliance on a benevolence God.

How does one “Take Heart”? By remembering. By surveying ones life and by recognizing those moments in your past where you were lost and a way was found. You recognize those times where you were not enough and provisions were made. You see again that you were carried when you could not go any more.

You “take heart” by not defining your life by your present feelings of loneliness, of fear, or abandonment. You take heart by ignoring or refusing to judge yourself for any lack of feelings of fervor, of hope, of faith. You remember and you take heart. You let your history of being cared for in and out of troubled times define your future.

As Bill Wilson says in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”;

“If you persist, remarkable things will happen. When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God’s hands were better than anything we could have planned. Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!”

 To “Wait” is to patiently endure your present circumstances and feelings until your rescue arrives. It is to gain hope in the present by remembering your past—to raise your eyes to the horizon, to the hills and mountains, from where your deliverance comes. And it will come.

Just as Jesus acknowledged his dejection and despair in the midst of his felt abandonment, we do not pretend what is not so. That is not hope. That is pretending. But also, like Jesus, we hold on to the trail of our story, the story of how the God of your youth is still at work to bring us through.

So, when it seems the sun has stopped, and the fire of life has been quenched, we  take heart by remembering. And, we wait in hope with our eyes raised and our hearts confident that we will again see the goodness of God in the Land of the Living.

For, in the final analysis, He never went anywhere.

Kind Regards,

Bob