Excerpt from Living in the Heart of Love: On the Cross
IN THE IMMEDIATE STATE of agony, God may not be visible, noticeable or appear present. This is the chaos state of extreme pain and distress. Jesus himself enters this place when he calls out “Father why have you abandoned me?” This is often misrepresented by theologians as Jesus failing and by non- religious as evidence that God was not there and that Jesus was wrong and doubted. But this cannot be so. For Jesus still called out to God, His Father. He knew He would hear him.
He may have felt abandoned by the sheer weight and extremity of suffering and torture He was experiencing.
Believe me, such extreme pain blanks the mind of understanding and reason, the burden of pain is intolerable, inescapable and you do not know where to place your awareness to cope with it.
You do not know what to do, you are robbed of normal consciousness. Oddly though your awareness of yourself somehow expands. Each time I have had to endure unbearable pain or had a near death experience, rather than feeling diminished, my consciousness of me in my mind has been huge and strong.
For myself, I have learned that the only way to endure such unendurable tormenting, beyond imagining, sheer pain, is, strangely enough, to go in to it, not resist it and to become incredibly still. This then is where I have come to find God unexpectedly close and present, even in the darkest place of my mind, where I have somehow dissociated and free floated within the pain. He too is truly there and has saved me. He has not necessarily done anything obvious.
No words have been spoken, though God does speak to me and I have heard Him many times. In these profound places of extreme torment I have not heard His Voice, only sensed Him being with me. But only when I have gone right into the pain and not resisted it when there has been no resistance for the pain to react against.
When I am in the chaos of unutterable indescribable agony I cannot necessarily feel God at all.
The power of the physical experience is huge, vast and all encompassing. I cannot bear the moment I am in. There is no other moment than this one and it seems to spread out to all eternity in an eternal moment of excruciating torture.
I don’t really have the words to describe the experience. It is more than torment, more than torture, more than indescribable, more than intolerable, more than unacceptable, more than completely unbearable. It is screamingly hostile and negating.
It is barbaric in its cruelty. It is exquisitely diminishing. It is almost completely incomprehensible in its agony it is so vast, so punishing, so pure, so bleak, so empty of life and full of sensations that is beyond endurance.
It is no wonder that Jesus called out to the Father and asked why had he abandoned him. Such is the nature of that place that all awareness can be blocked except for the pain itself that pierces every cell and every space between cells, every existing fibre of being is caught up in the torturing pain.
God, who loves us still and holds us all, is helpless to help us in that place in the sense that He cannot reach us, even though he reaches out to us. He weeps for us. He weeps with us, yet the physicality of the pain is immense and unquenchable. There is no other feeling here. All focus must be on coping, on bearing the unbearable, on remaining, on the pain itself, for there is no place that is not pain. There is no place that is not agony, there is no place that is not on fire with the violence of hurt, within the physicality of the body.
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It is no wonder He may have felt like God had abandoned Him for He not only felt his own pain but must have felt all that of all mankind for all time. To imagine the weight of His burden of pain is impossible. Our own pain is too much to bear. No wonder he was rewarded with the precious Gift of life, for he loved us all in that place of non- existence till the whole universe was filled with His love, His Spirit, His Light and its power returned to him in a miraculous healing power of Love.
Love given out to the very last drop returned in splendour and power and awe and might. The light of life here with us all. The gateway opened for all time for the healing of every soul.
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