Our days may be dark, but there is no oblivion for God's children

Book 2, Chapter 1 

          -Part 5-

Few things attack the soul more desperately than the fear of obscurity.

If we were to live and die without anyone registering our existence our primary terror would be the obscurity – literally, a life “covered over.”

Obscurity doesn’t come to us in the form of a sterile, solitary life lived in the absence of people. Obscurity thrives when we are among people, surrounded by fellow humans in metropolitan, suburban or rural life. Obscurity comes to us in the form of being lost in a crowd of two or millions.

Obscurity comes to those in declining health or advancing age in the form of being shut away in special institutions or at home separated from the people they still want in their lives.

When I was a teenager, my parents often visited my great-grandmother in a nursing home about 40 miles from our home. The layout of the building was exactly like a hospital – long wide hallways with a series of identical rooms on either side. Each room was divided into two living quarters by a thin cloth that hung from a metallic groove in the ceiling to about three feet above the floor.

It looked and smelled to me like a storage place for people who had outlived their usefulness. Gone were my great-grandmother’s quilting squares, the hundreds of snapshots she kept of the ever-enlarging, always-scattering family, and the stacks of birthday and anniversary cards she had always kept at the ready to send to each of us at the appropriate time.

Instead, she was situated in a room with dark peach tones and green linoleum swirled with white. The term “home” is an attempt to protect the heart from words like “facility” or “cell.” There is, however, no escaping the loss of identity, even with the names hurriedly scribbled and taped under the room numbers.

Worse even than the confined quarters of the residents were the elderly women strapped or tied into wheelchairs creeping along the handrails, begging us to take them home with us.

“Get me out of here!” one woman repeated to everyone who walked past her.

“Please … Hello … Please?” said another.

I heard one of the nurses tell my mother that some of the people there had not had a visitor for several years.

About 30 years after this my mother and I took my father to an Alzheimer’s care unit attached to the hospital where I was born. It was a four-mile drive from the house where my parents spent most of their lives. Dad didn’t know it, but he was being placed in this facility for the rest of his life. We had led him to believe he was in the clinic for tests on a pain in his back.

We escorted Dad to his room that was divided into two living quarters by a thin cloth that hung from a metallic groove in the ceiling to about three feet above the floor. He sat on the bed and said, “I don’t want to stay here.” Who could blame him?

It was then that I realized how small and obscure his life had become. No one ever goes down that hallway unless it is their job, or they are a relative who would feel guilty if they didn’t. This very real and very terrifying form of obscurity is familiar to thousands.

Obscurity comes to those whose families have grown and moved away; whose spouse has died; and whose home has become an empty shell with only loneliness as a decoration.

Obscurity haunts those who feel isolated, no matter how many people are around them or how healthy they are. Any time anyone says, “Nothing I do is appreciated,” they are crying out from a fear of obscurity. Anyone who dreads failing to fulfill what they believe is their purpose in life fears the blight of obscurity.

Psalm 88 is perhaps the most forlorn and suffering psalm in the Bible. Here, twice, the psalmist uses the word translated as “oblivion” by the New Jerusalem Bible, and “the place of forgetfulness” (the place where the dead are forgotten) in the Amplified Bible.

“I am already numbered among those who sink into oblivion,” he says. His thoughts are grave and dark. In fact, he speaks of the grave and of darkness. I know Psalm 88 as the one that ends in a profound whimper: “All that I know is the dark.”

Here is a writer of prayer who is deeply troubled about a life detached from meaning – a life covered over by time with no future trace of itself anywhere, or in anyone.

This basic anxiety is innate. We are created to belong, to be remembered, to live meaningfully. Our human condition may be meager or even awful, but we are never severed from the singular purpose of being beloved of God, and of loving him. It is into this loving embrace that we are invited, and to which our salvation frees us to run. I was first a Christian because I believed. I am now a Christian because I love. This is the quintessential movement out of obscurity and into the light.

God will move mountains to help me believe. He will move them further still to help me love.

No matter his condition or "state of life," the Christian knows he belongs; that God's thoughts toward him are endless; that he is remembered; and that he is loved. Our days may be dark, but there is no oblivion for God's children.