My God, have you forsaken me?

An illness is followed by the death of a family member and, when one has not yet recovered, the economic or labor problem arrives. There are times when we can only exclaim: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But can God abandon us, and would that be the attitude of a good father, a father who loves his children?

Certainly, there are situations in one's personal history when one cries out to heaven and finds no answer. Life's problems and difficulties sometimes run over you and you seem to find yourself alone, without help, in the very center of the whirlpool that sucks you into the dark waters of the deepest ocean.

It is understood that God is not a fairy godmother who comes to get us out of every difficulty. Nature, in this imperfect world in which we await the new heavens and the new earth, has its rules and acts without asking permission from its creator at every moment. That is why sickness, death or natural misfortunes come. To this we must also add the evil created by man: injustices, quarrels, disappointments....

One by one, the blows are overcome, but when they come one after the other, not even the best sparring partner can withstand them, and the question naturally arises: "Has God rejected us forever and will not favor us again? Has his mercy run out, has his promise ended forever? Has God forgotten his goodness, or has anger closed his heart?

There is nothing like the Psalms - the above quotation is a fragment of the 77th Psalm - to put words to the feelings of abandonment, loneliness and incomprehension of man in the face of evil and the apparent silence of God. If you are all-powerful, why don't you act, why are you silent, why do you allow this to happen to me?

Jesus himself prayed with one of them, number 22, when he experienced the bitterest face of his humanity, nailed to the cross. He who said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father," he who could not distance himself from God because he was God himself, also had feelings of remoteness, of abandonment; to a certain extent, of doubt, of uncertainty. This is the human frailty that he assumed to the extreme.

God's silence in the face of the suffering of his creatures has caused rivers of ink to flow and has burned billions of neurons of the most sublime thinkers, but an ancient legend runs through the Internet. norway -I have not been able to confirm if it is really Norwegian and if it is really old, which explains in a very simple way why God is so often silent.

The main character was a hermit named Haakon, who took care of a chapel where the local people went to pray before an image of a very miraculous Christ. One day, the anchorite, full of zeal and love for God, knelt before the image and asked the Lord to replace him on the cross:

-I want to suffer for you, let me take your place," he said.

His prayer reached the Most High, who accepted the exchange on the condition that the hermit should always keep silent, as He did.

Things went well in the early days, because Haakon was always silent up there on the cross and the Lord passed himself off as him without people noticing. But one day a rich man came to pray and, as he knelt down, he dropped his wallet. Our protagonist saw it and kept silent. After a while, a poor man appeared who, after praying, found the wallet, took it and left, jumping up and down with joy. Haakon continued to be silent when, shortly after, a young man entered and began to ask for protection for a dangerous journey he was about to undertake. At this, the rich man came back in looking for his wallet. Seeing the young man praying, he thought he might have found it and demanded it. Although the young man told him that he had not seen it, the rich man did not believe him and beat him up.

-Stop! -Haakon shouted from the top of the cross.

The attacked and the aggressor were stunned and, frightened by the sight of the speaking Christ, fled each in turn, leaving the hermit alone again with Jesus, who ordered him to come down from the cross for not having kept his word.

-Do you see how you were not fit to take my place? -the crucified man scolded him as he returned to his post.

-I could not allow this injustice, my Lord! -replied the hermit, already at the foot of the cross. You have seen that the boy was innocent.

Looking at him with mercy, Jesus explained:

-You didn't know that the rich man carried in his wallet the money to buy the virginity of a young girl, while the poor man needed that money so that his family would not die of hunger. That's why I let him take her. With the rich man's beating of the young traveler, I wanted to have prevented him from arriving in time, as he finally did because of you, to embark on a ship on which he had just met his death, for it had sunk. You did not know anything. I did, that's why I keep quiet.

And so ends this kind of midrash that teaches us to believe that, in God's will, is what is best for us and to trust in the one who we know, with his apparent silence, is also loving us dearly.

If you know someone who is getting beaten up by life, you might want to listen to this story of Haakon to understand the mysteries of the one who never leaves us, especially when we are on the cross.