A World of Loss

Where the Cry of Forsakenness Becomes the Only Hope

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Psalm 22

Tonight the weight is not theoretical. It is not an idea about suffering. It is the ache of it. The loneliness of others presses in. The quiet despair of those who wake up each day and carry what no one sees. The isolation that settles into the bones. I feel it and I include myself among them.

There is a strange mercy in being unable to turn back. I cannot rummage through the past. Too much has come and gone. Faces loved and buried in memory. Dreams once bright now dissolved like breath in winter air. Years of labor. Study. Rebuilding what collapsed. Communities crumbling and the long work of reshaping identity just to survive. Trying to hold together what was already passing away.

All of it so fragile. “All flesh is grass and all its beauty like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades.” Isaiah 40. It is not poetic exaggeration. It is fact. It passes like a wisp of smoke. No one remembers. No one sees the cost. And we too are forgotten.

Vanity of vanities says Ecclesiastes. Everything is vapor.

If this were the final word it would crush the soul.

But there is another Voice. A cry that rises out of history and yet stands outside it. A cry from a hill outside Jerusalem. Christ in Gethsemane. Christ on Golgotha. Sweating blood. Abandoned by friends. Betrayed by one of his own. “You will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” John 16. And then even deeper into the abyss. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

He descends into the exact place we fear most. The place where all illusions are stripped. Where no applause follows fidelity. Where love seems unanswered. Where the weight of the world presses so heavily that breathing itself becomes prayer.

Is this where hope is found.

St. Isaac the Syrian says that the one who has tasted affliction has tasted God. He speaks of the heart that has been broken open and made spacious through suffering. He does not romanticize it. He knows the darkness. But he insists that beneath it there is a mercy deeper than the sea. He says that this world is given for repentance. And repentance is not self hatred. It is the steady turning of the heart toward the Crucified.

Abba Arsenius prayed, “O God, lead me in the way of salvation.” And the answer he received was simple. Flee. Be silent. Pray always. Not because the world is evil but because the heart is easily deceived by what passes. The fathers stripped away everything that could not endure death. They wanted only what could pass through the grave with them.

The modern elders say the same in different words. Elder Sophrony speaks of standing on the edge of despair and refusing to step back. To descend with Christ into the hell of one’s own heart and to discover there not annihilation but uncreated Light. Archimandrite Zacharias speaks of the grace that visits the soul when it accepts the cross without argument. When it stops negotiating with suffering and simply stands before God.

Tonight the darkness does not feel like an enemy. It feels honest. The illusions have thinned. The religious performance has no strength here. The accomplishments do not console. The rebuilding of structures does not save. Only Christ remains.

The Cross is not an idea. It is the place where every human cry is gathered into one cry. The cry of the forsaken. The cry of the betrayed. The cry of those crushed by the weight of their own weakness and the indifference of others. And from that place comes not explanation but Presence.

The darkness has become light because it reveals what endures. It burns away what cannot last. It shows me that I am not the savior of anything. Not of communities. Not of dreams. Not even of myself. “Without me you can do nothing.” John 15. Nothing that lasts.

Only love remains. Not sentimental love. Crucified love. Love that stands when everything else collapses. Love that does not demand to be remembered. Love that is content to be hidden in Christ.

If it were not for the desert fathers and the elders who keep pointing to the Cross I might have mistaken this stripping for abandonment. Instead I begin to see that this is the narrow path. This is the place where hope is purified. Hope no longer in outcomes. No longer in recognition. No longer in stability. Hope only in Him who was dead and is alive.

St. Paul writes, “We always carry about in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested.” 2 Corinthians 4. The dying is not metaphor. It is the steady surrender of every illusion of permanence. The acceptance that we are dust. The consent to be forgotten. The willingness to lose even our image of ourselves.

And yet in that dying something unshakeable is born.

The world is a world of loss. This is true. But it is also the place where Christ has entered loss and filled it with Himself. The cry of forsakenness is not the end. It is the doorway. The darkness is not absence. It is the womb of a deeper light.

No illusions. Only love. Only Christ crucified.

And somehow that is enough.