Of limits and loss

We live the long, pained remembrance of loss. Those broken familial and familiar bonds we thought to last, all too common and atavistic in their unloveliness, descendant through history, find us and waken us from those dreams we hoped would fulfill. Sensing abandonment, a shift takes place from hope to endurance, a bracing that rises to a realization life extracts from us an exercise of will, a reliance upon self, a stance of against. We carry the remembrances, the weight of learned mistrust, of wariness and weariness, as if fate had descended to say this is inescapable. Loss touches us all, offering to each those crossroads this endurance brings.

If we wake, indeed are waking though unaware to what, we might rise and ask, “Where is God?” Even ask, “Is there a God?” Thus, loss becomes the first step on the journey to Him, becomes the essence of our awakening. Despair and disillusionment plant their seeds in those doubts residing within, waiting for their moment at the crossroad. Life, then, has taken us to that question, “To what do we give ourselves?” Crossroads are deceptive places, places to contemplate.

Too easily are these questions given to the confines of the human mind. To frame our condition by such limits blinds us from anything above our self. We turn to what we are able to observe, to validate by our being in the room of experience, what we believe is all that matters, that is, to control, to mitigate loss.

So, uncovering our predicament, we place upon God, if we have claimed His being, by grasping those positive human qualities familiar and close in mind to describe Him. We deceive ourselves, forgetting God cannot be fickle, selfish, and undependable. Could God ever be described by the human condition? Can the created so describe the Creator? How could the unlimited ever be contained by the limited? If so, we have taken the road most traveled.

Yet, we hope.

Each remembrance compels us to act. Loss is our call to seek God. It pervades like an underlying theme in a novel, a pall hovering in wait to be lifted. Loss becomes the door through which we walk or through which God enters, if the door unlocks from our side.

God is faithful and just, merciful in name. To know His name is to know who He is and better are we to know who than what. Though we walk too often and too long the wrong road, God’s road is always there for us to travel. He is there, walking it, waiting at the crossroad. Loss never has the final say.

Loss can never be the excuse by which we reduce God or constrain Him to human limits. But such can be the way to a place where before we have not been, a place of understanding, of knowing, of a peace we did not know when loss consumed us. God wishes to take us to this place where, when loss inevitably comes again, touches us, He comes to say, “Rest in my shade. I am enough. I make use of your loss.”