#BeingHuman. Between lament and hope… Meditations from the Desert of Anxiety… When peacetime theologies shatter… “Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand’” (Isaiah 41:10).
How easy it was to read these words in times of dominating peacetime theologies… What were they then but comfortable abstractions floating in the safety of our certainties? To nod sagely at their wisdom while sitting in comfortable pews – was that faith, or merely its simulation?
But now, stripped of all pretense, I (or we?) wrestle with their meaning like Jacob with his Angel, refusing to let go until I find a blessing in this darkness… Do my prayers, like stones thrown into a bottomless well, disappear into the void? What echoes return when we call into such emptiness?
Yet in this Desert of Anxiety, where certainties evaporate like morning dew and prayers echo in vast emptiness, I find myself returning to these words like a compass trembling toward an unseen North… “I am with you” – what could this mean in the face of such absence?
Not the grandiose promise of cosmic intervention (but why not?), not the comfortable illusion of “I will fix everything” (but could You not?), not even tomorrow’s hypothetical dawn… but the stark, terrible… intimacy… of pure presence: “I am with you.” What kind of presence persists in such absence?
Perhaps this is what faith becomes when our neat peacetime theologies shatter against the walls of reality – when the scaffolding of our certainties reveals the void beneath. Not a system of answers but a way of standing in that void, eyes open. When our polished doctrines crumble like dust, what remains?
The Community of Hope gathers in the rubble, reassembling faith not from peacetime certainties but from shared wounds… from the courage to remain present when Presence is all we have left… from trembling hands still reaching out to You and each other through Lament…
But aren’t these trembling hands also upheld by Yours? Is this not the paradox – that You strengthen not by removing our weakness, but by entering into our trembling itself?
I am dismayed – how could one not be, confronting the Desert of Anxiety? Yet dismay is not the end of the story. You do not promise an escape from this Desert of Anxiety, but You promise to walk through it with us…
Your righteous right hand does not shield us from suffering, but it does not tremble either… It gives us strength to remain human in inhuman times… to lament and hope when hope appears as madness to reason itself…
Tonight, as air raid sirens sing their dreadful song again, I whisper these words like a lifeline: Fear not… Not because there is nothing to fear – there is everything! – but because there is something that meets fear at its root…
Tomorrow I will rise again, trembling but upright, to do what must be done… My anxiety is not erased, but it is embraced by You, held in hands larger than my own…
Even if everything crumbles – and some days it seems it must – Your righteous right hand offers what the world cannot take: the freedom to cry out, to lament, to hope against hope… Is this not the ultimate freedom – to choose meaning in the face of meaninglessness?..
Like Christ on the cross crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I too face the question of feeling of divine absence… Yet wasn’t this cry itself an act of relationship, of terrible intimacy? Even in His most desperate hour, Jesus spoke to You, not of You… What deeper presence manifests in the courage to question?
I am learning that Your right hand doesn’t always lift us out of the abyss – sometimes it simply gives us the strength to be fully present in it… to remain human even when stripped of everything but our capacity to choose how we face the darkness… What is this strange gift of presence in absence?
On the cross, we are often alone… The crowd jeers or ignores, “traditional values” desert, and heaven seems silent… Yet in this very aloneness, we find a deeper Communion: with Christ who walked this path before us, with every soul who has faced the void and chosen to lament but hope anyway… Is this not the paradox of faith – that in ultimate solitude we discover ultimate solidarity?..
For now, in this dark night of our collective soul, perhaps this is enough: not answers, but Presence… Not escape, but endurance… Not triumph, but the freedom to keep reaching toward the light even when our trembling hands grasp nothing but shadow and anxieties…
In this reaching, this choosing, this lamenting, this hoping against hope – here, paradoxically, is where Your right hand holds us most firmly of all… Could it be that faith is not the absence of questions but the courage to ask them… to live them… to lament them… to “hope” them? Peace be with you and keep your children away from war…
Taras M. Dyatlik
20 February 2025
Odesa, Ukraine
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