Anyone with a passing familiarity with my blog has read posts in which I talk about my strained relationship with God. I wrote this particular piece, along with this one, many years ago, and sadly, I haven’t made much progress in the simple act of resting in God’s love and enjoying life. I should know in the deepest parts of my heart that I am loved, even though I am a complete foul up as a Christian. But I still find the concept of God as loving Father to be just nice words, but not a reality that has found its way deep into my heart in a convincing manner. This is not God’s fault, it is mine, the leftovers from years of dysfunctional living and not coming to grips with the depths of my pain.

This pain expresses itself in anger, in sudden outbursts of rage which surprise those around me and embarrass me that I have lost control and said or done things that have given a very poor witness to the Christian life. At those moments, I look like nothing more than one of the many hypocrites running around talking about Jesus and living a life that in practicality denies Him.

At my last round of Confession, during which I once again had to confess embarrassing behavior, my priest strongly suggested that ACOA meetings could be a help in getting to and dealing with the triggers that set off my anger. I have the ACOA “Big Book” on my dining room table. I decided to start reading it and it didn’t take long – actually, the first of the “ACOA Laundry List” – to touch a very tender spot in my life: Abandonment.

The sense of being abandoned is the first of fourteen traits that Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families experience. In reading just a few pages on this trait, I could easily call to mind all the times I have felt abandoned by family and people around me – teachers, school mates, and the world in general. To feel abandoned is to sense that I could disappear off the face of the earth and no one would care. One incident in particular stands out to me in recent memory.

After I was thrown out of seminary for complaining about our parish priest, a man who was later quietly removed to another parish because of scandal, I tried to settle in and resume my life as a lay person. One thing I wanted to do was to become a cantor for the Divine Liturgy. After weeks of making my desire known and getting no response, I decided that the parish had no use nor interest in me and found my way to another parish, where I began to attend services. Here’s the rub, the thing that makes me feel the way I do regarding abandonment.

No one called me. Not a single person picked up the phone to call and say “Edward. Where have you been? We have missed you.” My sense of the world, both of family and of friends, has been that I am wanted only in the most utilitarian of senses. If I do good, if I can contribute something to the good, then I am wanted around. But if I fail to perform, I am subject to being harped on and ignored. This goes for family as well as those in the world around me. My parents did little to make me feel special. I remember being about nine years old and asking my mother one day, as we stood in the kitchen, if I was adopted. Wrap your mind around that for a second. A nine-year-old who feels so disconnected from his family that he isn’t sure he was even born into it. Uncles and aunts did little to help, especially my crazy Uncle Terry, who was always aloof and critical. I was too young to realize he was a nutjob, who was the whispered annoyance of the entire neighborhood.

So, what does a dog have to do with this? Well, if you remember, I recently wrote about our new dog, Dodger. He has turned out to be an incredibly good pup, more so than I could have ever imagined when I first went to the Fairfax County Animal Shelter to adopt him. The bottom line is that the dog simply loves me to death. And he lets me know it every day. He wants to be around me and whines when I have to leave and can’t take him with me. When I come back, he bounds down the stairs, in danger of breaking his fool neck in his haste to get to me. Once in the house, I cannot pet and stroke and touch him enough. His next five minutes are an intense litany of doggie love to me, complete with a face wash if I am in the mood to let him slobber all over my face. He lays down beside me when I watch television, waiting for that magical moment when I will pick up a ball and spend some time playing catch with him. At night he is happy to jump up on my bed and spend the night sleeping next to me. In every way imaginable he makes it known that he loves me and wants to constantly be with me.

You see, to me, this is love, and something that I have never experienced from any human being on the face of this earth. To me, this is the way that love is supposed to work. To be loved so intensely that the person who does love you cannot stand to be without you, wants to spend all of his/her time with you, and cares deeply for your welfare. For me, as a dysfunctional person from a dysfunctional family, this lack of love from family and the outside world has left a gaping hole in my psyche. It has created and nurtured that sense of abandonment from which Adult Children suffer. Our addiction is the only way we know how to medicate away the pain of believing in our deepest heart that we are worthless. I cannot tell you the number of times I looked in the mirror as a young man and absolutely hated what I saw staring back at me. People who are normal will read this and not be able to understand, but my ACOA brothers and sisters will understand all too well.

Now here’s the worst part, and before I say more, let me say that what I am about to write is not written from a good or proper understanding of God and spirituality: My sense of abandonment easily works its way into my relationship with God. I often find myself struggling with feelings of abandonment regarding Him. Let me explain a little deeper.

I have prayed for over three decades for my children to come to Christ. Nothing. Yet when I look around me, I see Muslims, who don’t recognize Christ as anything other than a prophet, receiving dreams and visitations from Him which bring them to belief in Him. Why not my children? Why not do this for me in response to my prayers? My dysfunctional self says, “It’s because you are worthless. You haven’t prayed enough, fasted enough, or been the kind of person who deserves to have his prayers answered.” In short, just like my earthly father, my heavenly Father is there, but just not for me personally. I never could please my earthly father and apparently, because of all the bad things that have happened to me, this makes me feel that I haven’t pleased my heavenly Father either. When you please someone, they respond in love towards you, seeking your happiness.

Then I read about those with whom God had a very special relationship, making His presence intimately and personally known to them. Is it wrong for me to want the same thing? Like I stated regarding Dodger’s relationship to me, that dog wants to be everywhere I am. Does God? I certainly don’t feel it, and that is what I want to feel. I want to feel His nearness, to sense that He is present in my life in a way that I can palpably feel. I want to see prayers answered, especially for those who I care for. I want to sense Him close to me and know that I am cared for and not just a tiny blip on the cosmic radar of eternity.

And herein lies a deeper problem. Every saint in the history of the Christian faith came to such a deep and intimate relationship with God by deep acts of intense fasting, long hours of prayer, and other works of profound asceticism. In other words, they had to do something in order to earn that relationship! Do you have any idea what such knowledge does to someone who could never earn his earthly father’s love and approval? It reinforces the thinking that the only way I am ever going to be loved is through perfect behavior. That is deadly thinking. To think that you will only be loved if you are a perfect person is an open invitation to despair, especially to someone like me who is a world-class foul up. Hot mess doesn’t begin to describe my Christian life. If I could just pray more. If my prayers were more earnest. If I fasted on bread and water only this coming Lenten season. And on and on and on the list goes of things I need to do in order to gain God’s approval and have that relationship that I so desire.

Now, having whined and complained, let me hasten to state that everything I have said in the past paragraph is crap. Pure, unadulterated crap. But this is what a dysfunctional person struggles with. Our thinking is not right. It is warped by years of abuse at the hands of others, often the very people who should be the most loving and supportive. I am simply being honest as I write about my own personal struggles. It takes time, sometimes a whole lifetime, for dysfunctional people to get their thinking straight and have a normal relationship with the world around them. In my more sane and lucid moments, I can sit down and remember many times where God was there as my loving, heavenly Father, bailing me out of difficult situations, protecting me from harm (like the time I barely missed being run over and killed by a train!), and showing His guidance and direction in my life. These doubts and struggles are compliments of the evil one, who wishes my destruction, both physically and spiritually.

So let me end this piece on an upbeat. I have places I can go where I do experience love, the first of all being my parish, where I have two very dear friends who make me feel cared for – my priest, Fr. David, and my chrismation sponsor, Fr. Deacon Nicholas. I have friends who show me appreciation and with whom I spend good times together. I have many good things happening in my life right now, especially when I look at the so many various tragedies which are being experienced by others. God has been good to me – very good to me, the one who wanted nothing to do with Him. I wanted my sin, and He gave me His forgiveness. I ran away, and He followed, calling until I surrendered. In ways that I need to constantly remember, He has guided my life, been there for me, and is there now, even though I can’t feel it as I want to.

And I have Dodger. He, too, is God’s gift to me!