"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
-- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabach-thani?' that is, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" - Matthew 27:46

I think that we women (at least, some of us) who have aborted understand this cry. And with that cry, God learned what we may have felt like: what it feels like to be forsaken of God. With that cry, we can now know there's an Easter dawn that can follow such choking despair.

P.S. I add a P.S. here because, as we've said several times before, both Emily and I know that this doesn't apply to all of us who are postabortive and who do seriously regret the choice. It doesn't "require God" to find ourselves changing our minds about abortion. By posting this, I truly don't imply or mean that, nor that I want to proselytize or force any religiosity on anyone. I don't.

This struck me today because, lately, there's been lots of discussion, frank, gut-revealing discussion, about wondering where exactly God was when we needed him most to help us avoid the abortions we felt we had no other choice but to have.