God is the guarantor of human fulfilment
Part 4: Life may cut us to the quick, but in God we find healing and wholeness
Does this help in any way? Perhaps not in the first vice-like grip of loss, but, I repeat, apart from the comfort of God, there is no other comfort and we are simply left with the pain of loss. However, God becomes the “place” in which all that we have loved and lost is kept safe. Again, this might seem offensive, for manifestly, if you have lost a loved one whom you hoped would not die, then they are not safe in the way that we desire. But desiring something is not enough to have it. Having lost the one whom we love, God can still act as the accumulated reservoir of all human goodness and love. In my mourning of the one I love, and in the community’s sharing in that mourning, both the reverence we feel for the person and our sense of loss have been incorporated into the faithful community’s appreciation of the wholeness of God. In this appreciation, nothing that we hold dear is ever lost. Even when I die, along with everyone else who once mourned the one I love, so that even though there is no longer any direct memory of the person who was lost, nevertheless, that person is still held within the mind and heart of God, because God “became bigger” because of the love and loss that we poured out in our mourning.
Now, yes, I agree that this is all very philosophical. How can it be any counter to the raw grief, anger and hatred generated by loss – especially where there is injustice involved? Well, the grief and all the rest are generated by life whether we like it or not; we only have our philosophy of life to help us through it. I am simply arguing that faith in God is the best – and, in fact, the only complete – way to do it. Of course, if God is a real personal agent outside of ourselves – as I hope and believe him to be – then all the hope of traditional faith is open to us. If God can live a spiritual life not limited in any way by the material universe – yet still be able to interact with it – then this God of perfect love and goodness will most certainly impart to us, whom he loves, all the recompense of perfect, eternal life in heaven. How could a God of love do otherwise? My purpose is to put forward ideas for those who find it too difficult to believe in such a God. The ideas are in the manner of a safety-net or backstop: even if God is “only” an idea created by us humans, then – as the greatest human creation ever – the concept of God is still fully efficacious in achieving the recompense for us that he achieves as an independent personal agent.
So, my intent is to promote the life of faith in God. He is the way to bring perfect fulfilment into our lives. If we are fortunate in life, even though we will inevitably still experience enormous heartache, we may be lucky enough to get through – to age 63 or longer! – and be able to simply rejoice in all the goodness, truth and love that we have experienced. However, if we suffer greatly, the thought of God incorporating into himself all our grief and loss, and holding in his heart all the preciousness that we feel in relation to what we have lost, is a way of allowing us to accept that nothing good is ever lost, because all that is good is contained in God, who is perfect goodness.
Spiritual Devotion 