"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Possibly the most depressing words ever spoken, they come from Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible.  We tend to think about them most intently during Lent, when many of us recall that as he hung on the cross in agonizing pain, Jesus yelled them out to God.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, nailed to a wooden cross, and abandoned by his friends, Jesus had nowhere to turn but God.
     Yet in Jesus' hour of deepest need, God, his father, the father who had loved him, as Jesus put it, "before the foundations of the world," abandoned Jesus, his only son.  He turned his face away from him, unwilling and unable to look upon him as he endured God's penalty of hell for sin.  It's an unbearable picture:  total isolation and unremitting darkness and despair.  Jesus was separated from life itself.
     If we read the rest of Psalm 22, however, we see that after those words of horrific angst, the writer says to God, "But you are holy and enthroned on the praises of Israel."  The writer is voicing his conviction that even if God appears to have abandoned him, he remains a good, worthy, and loving God.  Because Jesus died, he rose, and because he rose, every human being can experience, if she wants, union with God.  Although we often suffer terribly in this earthly existence, God remains good.  His love pervades all things. Recognizing this is indeed the supreme challenge of faith:  we do not always know what will happen next.  And we do not always know why.  But we know God.
     If God's love is not present, pain and despair have no real conqueror.  And the universe, as the atheist Jean Paul Sartre pointed out, is darker and lonelier than we can possibly imagine.
     As we continue through Lent, contemplations and meditations of pain, joy, and all, I encourage us to remember the ubiquity of God.