Is This the Age of Abandonment?

Photo by Ben Cliff via Unsplash

I was trying not to panic.

The thought racing through my mind was, Where is she? Where’s my mom?

I was little. It was the first or second day of kindergarten. Class had just been dismissed. And I came out through the door that opened to the canopied walk that led to the parking lot and eventually to home.

My mom would be there to pick me up and walk me home, like we planned. I looked up and down the sidewalk both ways, and I still couldn’t see my mother.

Looking back, I’m sure she was just a minute or two late. But all I could think was, How will I get home?

Well, she did come walking up. She took my hand reassuringly and said, chiding me a bit, “I told you I’d come. I told you I’d be here.”

Of course. But children have deep fears.

Even children from secure homes have this fear of being abandoned.

For one thing, children don’t have much personal history to draw on to assure them that, “Of course a parent can be counted on to come.” They so live in the moment that visualizing beyond the present can seem hard.

And parents, the best of them, are only human. Prone to forget or ignore or get full to the brim with stimuli that make them screen out a child. And some parents, we must admit, do harm or let their children down. Profoundly. Some children’s fear of abandonment is rooted in their tragic reality of already being neglected.

But it’s not just little people.

Freya India, a UK blogger, speaking of her generation’s fears, and their hesitancy to make commitments to anyone, writes that her Gen Z friends face struggles that feel unparalleled: “many of us grew up in broken homes. Our parents are strangers to one another; our childhood a series of exchanges from one house to the next. No real home, no place to belong.” Fewer and fewer young people live in a household where both parents are present.

Yes, non-intact families are not really new, she goes on. But decades ago communities and neighborhoods were more stable. Maybe extended family lived close. “Now our families,” she says, “fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. … We simply don’t believe anyone will stay.” That’s why she calls our time “the age of Abandonment.”

That abandoning happens in more daily and subtle ways, of course, too, like a friend or relative that simply stops replying to emails or reciprocating Christmas letters. We get quietly ghosted when not invited to a family gathering, or targeted on social media, or chided in our circles of acquaintances. We long to know, to echo Taylor Swift, that we not just tolerated, but celebrated.

All these trends happen so regularly that in psychology and counseling circles “estrangement” is an emergent field of study. And counselors and helpers come to grips with a trend of adult children or siblings going “no contact” with their family—cutting them off. Blocking any email or text or phone connecting.

Sometimes an adult child finds relief and freedom in decisions like that. No one needs abuse. It’s also true that the parent may feel pain or confusion, finding the relationship, the child, as one parent called it, “both unreachable and unmournable.”

Or this being put or pushed aside may happen in another web of relating that matters for some of us, like pastors who give toxic responses to non-conforming parishioners. A church crowd who threatens or enacts a cut-off. Sometimes churches can act unconscionably to their clergy leaders, too.

And I’m thinking of another setting where we can feel overlooked or ignored: it may not be a long step to think about God in this way. I mean God as an aloof or removed being. Only “distant … stately,” as Emily Dickinson mused in one of her poems in a moment of worry and wondering. (See my last month’s blog: “Did God Just Ignore You?”)

But I see, again and again, another picture of who God is. One that seems all the more urgent and hopeful given our predicament. For what if a moment of a milestone rejection sets me — sets you — off on a new path? it is precisely in such moments that we reach out for the “marvel” that communion with God is, for the conviction that “written into the heart of the universe … is open and free conversation between us and God; that the universe is personal; that time rushes over a bedrock of love” [Julie Canliss]

And I see a conviction like this confirmed in what for many is a surprising place: The old—make that ancient—belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

For here we see communal intimacy between a Father, a Son, a Spirit that shares in and binds together a lovely, loving conversation. In this picturing we see steady communion that makes our most intimate human moments pale. And helps us navigate the harsh ones. For this articulation of what God is like gives us a picture of a God who can—and wants to—relate. Who is relatable. Who will not leave us desolate. And here is a God who made us but also set us in networks and interconnective tissues of family and friends and neighbors. And when those ties and tissues snap? “The relational God who created the relational universe,” writes Julie Canlis, “desires us.” Wants to be around us. Extends to us an everlasting invitation to be in relationship.

I don’t want to overspiritualize the emotional bruises and desperate pain we can feel from relational wreckage or being cruelly dissed. I do wonder if you might, pondering this picture of a God who is both infinite and intimate, find solace. Might you and I come to say, Here is a God whose love is more sure and steady than the best of human love? Who will not abandon me?

Tell me if you do. Send me a message from the contact form at the top of my web page. I’d like to hear your story. I could listen, and I might also be encouraged in my own moments of need and longing.