Photo by Jimmy Hemphill: flickr.com/photos/jimmah_v

​"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

This cry has slipped through the lips of many a dementia caregiver. Long nights filled with anxiety rather than sleep, decisions heavier than a person should bear alone, the constant clamor of questions already answered and blame for offenses that never occurred, leave you feeling empty and lost, estranged from friends, from self, from God.

This profound isolation is difficult to confess, because if you risk discussing it some people will blame you for it. A common bit of wisdom is, “If you feel further from God, who moved?” I don’t know if the people who say this believe it is helpful, but it certainly wasn’t helpful to me.

Here’s something that was helpful. Once when I was feeling this way I came across something written by Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace. “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”

This image from Weil transformed my spiritual practice and reawakened my faith. I realized that my sense of abandonment could become a way to connect with God instead. I simply let my sense of estrangement be my prayer. With that lostness, that mental and physical exhaustion, I knocked on the wall that seemed to exist between God and myself.

I can’t say that the painful feelings went away, but a new kind of faith began to arise in the midst of them – a faith less grounded in what I felt and more rooted in a Presence from whom there is never any separation.