In an episode of Dr. Who, the doctor and his companion, Amy Pond, travel back in time to visit with artist, Vincent Van Gogh. Amy and Vincent become instant friends, but as they walk along the countryside, Vincent suddenly notices that Amy is crying and asks her why.
Amy seems surprised herself that she is crying and can’t figure out why.
What Amy doesn’t know, but what the viewer knows is that Amy—in a plot you could only see in Dr. Who— has lost her fiancé. He was murdered and if his murder wasn’t enough, he was then swallowed by a rift in space-time that meant that not only was he dead, but it was as if he had never existed at all.
Amy has no memory of her lost fiancé. But even so, she is pained with an unimaginable and unexplainable grief.
There are moments when I feel a lot like Amy. I think we all have times like that. We may not have lost a loved one to a hole in the fabric of the universe, but, like Amy, we intuit that something is not right with the world we’re living in.
It’s as if we’ve been talking to God on the phone, having a powerful discussion on life and soul-work, and then we realize half-way through the conversation that the call has been dropped. And we wonder how long we’ve been out of touch, realizing that if we had only stopped talking sooner and started listening, we would know exactly where we stood with God.
Suddenly something inside us is broken. Suddenly we feel like half a soul.
We mourn. We grieve and we don’t know why. One day we’re at church or work and feeling full and blessed and then the next day, we are inexplicably saddened. We’ve lost something.
The world feels broken. And maybe, at most, we are aware of one, one-millionth of one percent of the specifics of that brokenness.
All we may know is only that something is “off.”
It is at these times, though, when we are sad and lost that we are most open to hearing God’s voice, if we could only sit still and listen.
Because God heals. God heals rifts in space and rifts in our souls even when we don’t know what exactly we’re grieving for.
God heals. God’s desire is to heal and by healing bring us closer to Him.
One of the ways we can aid our own healing is by finding those moments in life when we do feel closer to God, when He feels so near, we want to open our eyes during prayer, or reach out with our hand, convinced He is sitting there right next to us.
In The Fruits of the Spirit, Evelyn Underhill writes of those times. She says, “Have you not known such moments in life, when perhaps the sudden sight of a wild cherry in blossom, the abrupt disclosure of a great mountain, or the crowning moment of a great concerto, has revealed the perfect and flooded you with tranquil joy” (20).
I am glad to have found a kindred spirit in Evelyn Underhill. For I have felt those same things and when I am most shaken by the events of the world, I seek out the moments that Underhill describes.
In effect, I pick up the phone and try and reach God again.
