"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.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, and nailed to a wooden cross, Jesus felt totally alone and abandoned, even by God.
     In Jesus' hour of deepest need, God, his father, the father who had loved him, as Jesus had earlier put it (John 17), "before the foundations of the world," rejected 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 and absolute isolation and unremitting depths of 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." God had to abandon Jesus in order to embrace us.  God to turn his eyes away from his son so as to turn his eyes toward us.  God is unspeakably good, so good that he was willing to endure the totality of all that is not good in order to bring us into the totality of all that is.
     Though we often suffer terribly in this earthly existence, God is good.  His love endures.  And it pervades all things, even the utter and abject loneliness of his only son. If God's love is not present, pain and despair have no real conqueror.  And the universe, as Jean Paul Sartre (who was, ironically, an avowed atheist) pointed out long ago, is darker and lonelier than we can possibly imagine.