Pulse aquí para leer la Introducción a A la luz de Dios.
David is turning twenty-one, a milestone he’s been dreaming of since he was thirteen. That was a bad time. All his parents did was fight. But since they were devout Christians who didn’t drink or smoke, and always sought out the strictest churches, divorce was out of the question. It would be a sin. Instead, they divided the house and lived in separate halves. That calmed down the fighting, but for David and the other kids, it was like living in a cold war zone.
He’d planned it all out, how on the day he turned twenty-one, he’d buy beer and cigarettes and plop them right down on the kitchen table, and then—drinking, smoking and cussing as much as he wanted—tell them he was out of there and they could all go to hell.
But his mom beats him to it. Two days before his birthday, everybody comes home from jobs and school to an empty house. Her clothes are gone, along with the old mantle-place clock and some of the dishes. There’s a note: I got my own apartment. I’m not coming back. Don’t try to find me. I’ll be in touch when I’m settled in.
So here he sits, alone on his twenty-first birthday. No beer, no cigarettes—not even a cake. His mother has left them. She couldn’t even stick around to wish him a happy birthday. He tries to tell himself it’ll be better for his parents this way. Maybe his brothers and sister will finally have a chance to live a normal life. But he feels hollow inside, as though by leaving them, she’s cut out his heart and he’ll never get it back.
Abandonment by a parent can inflict permanent damage on the psyche. Children who’ve been abandoned when they are young can so intensely fear being left again that they struggle to form trusting adult relationships. When they finally do allow themselves to commit, they often cling so hard they drive their partners away. Or they live in a state of high anxiety, certain the relationship can’t last. Constantly doubting their partner’s intentions, they are often angry, unreasonably jealous, or depressed by imaginary slights. They may find it difficult to form a healthy sense of self. They may even develop serious mental illnesses, such as borderline personality disorder.
Though David will forever associate his mother’s leaving with his miserable milestone birthday, he and his siblings were in a certain sense abandoned by both parents many years before one of them actually left. Obsessed with their anger toward one another, neither had the energy or inclination to build genuinely loving relationships with their children. Emotionally, David has been on his own since he was a toddler.
Neither did he get a chance to develop the kind of religious beliefs that might have given him strength and comfort. Though his parents took them to various churches during his childhood, the marriage was so hostile they couldn’t risk becoming part of any real community; they might be judged. So despite sitting in many pews along the way, David does not associate God with love and certainly does not think of God as a refuge. If he has any picture of God at all, it has been shaped by the legalistic and judgmental attitude of his parents.
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Elizabeth Seton also knew what it felt like to be abandoned. When she is barely a toddler, her father Richard Bayley leaves his young wife and two small daughters and sails for England to continue his medical studies. While he is gone, the British invade the rebellious colonies, landing thirty-two thousand British and Hessian soldiers in lower Manhattan. Though Elizabeth’s mother has by then moved her children to safety, war and talk of war dominate Elizabeth’s first few years.
Cuando su padre regresa por fin de Inglaterra, es cirujano del ejército británico y está destinado lejos de su mujer y sus hijas pequeñas. Aunque va de visita cuando puede, sus visitas son escasas. Y entonces, cuando Elizabeth tiene dos años, su madre muere poco después de dar a luz a una tercera hija. Las niñas, huérfanas de madre, se quedan con unos parientes en Long Island mientras su padre regresa a su puesto militar.
Though her father remarries within a year, the marriage is an unhappy one, and so the pattern established when Elizabeth was only a baby continues: her real mother is never coming back, her step-mother is incapable of mothering, and always, her father’s career comes first. When she is fourteen, with more rumors of war in the air, her father once again sails for England to pursue his studies. Relegated to yet another stint in the home of relatives, Elizabeth waits longingly for his infrequent letters. At a time when she most needs the reassurance of his love, she cannot help but wonder if she matters much at all to him. As she writes, “I thought at that time my Father did not care for me.”
Though they finally begin to form a relationship when she is fifteen, it is a lopsided one. Now that he is finally paying attention to her, Elizabeth devotes herself to making him happy. Writing of a commonplace book he encourages her to keep, she says, “This book was began when I was fifteen and written with great delight to please my father.” Though they grow closer, in the back of her mind, Elizabeth understands that his new affection for her is partly due to the widening gulf in his marriage.
Despite how much she loves and admires him, Richard Bayley deals her one last blow. When he dies in her arms of at age fifty-seven, he knows full well how dire are her straits. Her young husband has recently declared bankruptcy; Elizabeth has had to oversee the sale of their home and most of their goods. Yet Bayley has never bothered to revise his will; the inheritance that might have made an enormous difference in his favorite daughter’s life is instead left to a woman he has not lived with for years, Elizabeth’s estranged stepmother.
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Jesus’ anguished cry from the Cross evokes the hollow sense of abandonment that David felt on his twenty-first birthday and by Elizabeth Seton each time her father failed to come through: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15: 33-35). At the moment of death, Jesus is giving voice to a peculiarly painful experience: He who I most love has left me.
Often, this feeling arises during times of loss and grieving. Other times, it’s when we’re so distracted we lose the thread of prayer. And sometimes it simply happens, as it mysteriously did for decades in the life of Mother Teresa. As she describes it in private letters to her spiritual director, “I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing (Jesus, please forgive my blasphemies).”
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Isabel encontró mentores espirituales que la ayudaron a comprender lo que ocurría bajo la superficie en esos dolorosos momentos en que se sentía abandonada, ya fuera por su padre terrenal o por Dios. Desde el principio, los santos cristianos han concebido la vida de fe como un largo y difícil viaje por un camino sinuoso que, con demasiada frecuencia, está oscurecido por la niebla. Al principio, nos sentimos entusiasmados y animados por el desafío que nos espera. Luego empezamos a darnos cuenta de lo poco que sabemos y de lo mucho que nos queda por aprender. Durante esta fase más desalentadora, a veces buscamos un mentor o maestro que pueda impartirnos los conocimientos que nos faltan. Estudiamos, meditamos, intentamos absorber todo lo que podemos.
But then, often just as we are finding our footing and the excitement is beginning to stir again, we are suddenly plunged into a state of unknowing. We can’t sense God’s presence, no matter how hard we pray. It’s as though we’ve been abandoned and are now lost, shivering and alone in the middle of the trail on an inky, starless night.
St. John of the Cross, who influenced some of Elizabeth’s most important mentors, refers to these baffling experiences as “dark nights of the soul.” They can feel like episodes of depression. They can be quite frightening. But if they are truly from God, they are accomplishing something marvelous within us. We are growing at a level not accessible to our conscious minds. As John of the Cross explains: “Rather than a sign that God [is] far, ‘this dark night’ is an inflowing of God into the soul.’”
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Comprender que incluso la vida más devota no sigue un camino recto, fácil de trazar y cómodo, sino que está llena de altibajos inspiradores y devastadores, ayudó a Isabel a mantener el rumbo. Y aunque todavía no ha encontrado a Dios, también hay mucha esperanza para David. A pesar de sus experiencias negativas en la iglesia, la herida en su corazón causada por el abandono paterno ha fomentado en él un gran anhelo. Cuando deje atrás la infancia e intente construir su propia vida, buscará algo mejor, algo en lo que pueda confiar, algo que pueda amar sin miedo al abandono.
Se dé cuenta o no, la buena noticia es que estará buscando a Dios.
Para saber más sobre esta serie de siete reflexiones sobre la Pascua, pulse aquí.
PAULA HUSTON es becaria del Fondo Nacional de las Artes y autora de dos novelas y ocho libros de no ficción espiritual. Sus ensayos y relatos han aparecido en Best American Short Stories y en la antología anual Best Spiritual Writing. Al igual que la Madre Seton, Huston es una conversa al catolicismo. En 1999, se hizo oblata benedictina camaldulense y es miembro laico de la comunidad de monjes de New Camaldoli Hermitage en Big Sur, California. También es ex presidenta de la Sociedad CrisóstomoOrganización nacional de escritores católicos literarios.