Desolation and Consolation

Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 21st of Ninth Month, 2025

Scripture: Jeremiah 8:18-9-1, Romans 8:35-39

Good Morning, Friends!

Romans 8:35–39, NRSVUE: ³⁵ Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? ³⁶ As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all day long;we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In the life of the spirit, there are two conditions, or experiences, that are known as desolation and consolation. These are somewhat fancy words, but they’re not hard to understand. They simply refer to the felt presence of God—about whether or not a person, or a group of people, can feel or sense God’s presence. Desolation is how we name an experience, a stretch of time, or a place, where God seems to be absent; consolation is how we name experiences, times, or places where God’s presence can be felt in some way. So desolation is God’s absence, and consolation, God’s presence. In the rhythms of daily life, there are plenty of opportunities to experience both desolation and consolation, and of course, each individual’s experience of God varies; one person may experience desolation when or where another experiences consolation.

These names for these two modes of experience come from to us from elsewhere in

the Christian tradition, from the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church. Ignatius Loyola, thefounder of the Jesuits, made an awareness of desolation and consolation part of the daily spiritual practices for the members of his order. Loyola directed his followers to take up a process he called examen at the end of each day. In its simplest form, examen is prayerful meditation on the events of the day, considering how God has been present—considering where one has experienced consolation or desolation.

Examen, and the larger group of Ignatian spiritual exercises that it comes from, is today popular as a spiritual discipline among Christians of all sorts. Examen can also be applied to a period longer than a day—a week, month, or year—to devote oneself to greater sensitivity to God’s presence, guidance, and direction. It is certainly true for me that I cannot always see how God has been at work except in hindsight. So there will be times when what felt desolate in the moment may turn out to be a consolation, as I look back. Perhaps you have had the same experience.

It should be no surprise that we can see both of these types of experience in the Bible; I imagine that Ignatius Loyola took his model from the Scriptures, as he read of the spiritual struggles and joys of God’s people.

Consolation and desolation are all through the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms. Consolation is the quiet waters and green pastures of Psalm 22, the comfort of the shepherd’s rod and staff for the flock under God’s care. Consolation is the peace of a satisfied soul in God’s close embrace, like a weaned child with its mother, as in Psalm 131:

I have calmed and quieted my soul,like a weaned child with its mother;my soul within me is like a weaned child... (131:2, var.)

And in the prophets, consolation is peace for a nation that has known only war and exile, as in the words of the prophet Isaiah:

“Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God.² “Speak kindly to Jerusalem;And call out to her, that her warfare has ended,That her guilt has been removed,That she has received of the Lord’s handDouble for all her sins.” (Isaiah 40:1–2, NASB)

On the other hand, desolation in the Hebrew Bible is associated with violence and threats of violence, betrayal and danger. We see this many places in the Psalms—

¹ Save me, O God,for the waters have come up to my neck.

² I sink in deep mire,where there is no foothold; (Ps 69:1–2, NRSV)

And from the midst of this desolation, the Psalmist cries out to God:

¹⁷ Do not hide your face from your servant,for I am in distress—make haste to answer me. (69:17, NRSV)

The Psalmist cries out, and it seems that God does not always answer.

Desolation is also associated with places abandoned by human habitation; the desert and the wilderness, the places of wild animals; lands that once were fertile that had been deserted; vineyards and orchards no longer tended and left to run wild.

And in the New Testament, desolation is Jesus on the cross: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Most of these examples help us to see desolation in an individual dimension, as an individual’s feeling of the absence of God. But there are plenty of collective expressions of desolation in the Bible as well. And this is what the prophet Jeremiah expresses in our first reading today, in 8:18–9:1:

18 My joy is gone; grief is upon me;my heart is sick.

19 Listen! The cry of the daughter of my peoplefrom far and wide in the land:“Is the Lord not in Zion?Is her King not in her?” ...

20 “The harvest is past, the summer is ended,and we are not saved.”

21 For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken,I mourn, and horror has seized me.

22 Is there no balm in Gilead?Is there no physician there?

Why then has the health of the daughter of my peoplenot been restored?

Jeremiah expresses his own deep grief, but this is not simply his desolation—it is the desolation of an entire people, the kingdom of Judah as a whole. What he elsewhere calls “the wound of his people” is their unfaithfulness. His lament here is for a people who have separated themselves from God. Even the balm of Gilead, a fabled remedy that came from that mountainous land across the Jordan River, can not help.

So we are reminded that our desolation, our inability to connect with God, sometimes comes from circumstances that are not our own choosing—from things that are done to us—and other times it comes from our own decisions. This can be true for an individual, and it can be true for a group—a church, a city, an entire society.

Friends, I have to confess that this message was born in my own sense of desolation this week. When I am getting ready to speak for worship in any given Sunday, I usually have

some sense of direction as I prepare; usually as the week wears on, I will get a little glimmer of what I could say, of the direction God might be inviting me to go in. Usually, I count that as consolation—“thank you, God, that you brought that Scripture, or that idea, or that quote to my mind—I can build on that.” But this past week has been both very busy—which is not unusual—but also spiritually very dry for me. And that, of course, on top of everything that is going on around us—so many heavy needs, so much that is overwhelming on just about every level, from the individual on up to our society as a whole.

Yet in the midst of my own desolation, I remembered—or perhaps God reminded me— of what is perhaps the supreme example of consolation in the New Testament, from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul here speaks of the unfailing love of Christ, reminding us of God's giving nature. In fact, Paul says, there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus. Nothing—no power earthly or spiritual; nothing from the past, present, or future; nothing high, nothing low; not even death itself can keep us from God’s love.

Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t still plenty of desolation and despair around us and within us. Paul doesn’t promise that those who love God and seek to follow Jesus' will are always going to have an easy time of it. The very people that Paul originally wrote to, the Roman church, were likely facing a lot of trouble in their day: “affliction, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril [and the] sword,” (v35, par.) were likely all too real for some of them, especially if, as some scholars believe, the church was being persecuted in this period. That seems to be why Paul quotes Psalm 44 in v36: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” That had to be an experience that the church in Rome could relate to in some way. Today, our experience is different; today I can not read the phrase “we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered,” and not think of the civilian populations of Gaza and Ukraine. Nonetheless—God’s love is present, and God’s love is what makes it possible for us to love. We love because God first loved us; and when we turn to our neighbors and even to our enemies in love, we do so because God is loving before and after and alongside us.

Friends, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ—no power earthly or spiritual; nothing from the past, present, or future; nothing high, nothing low; not even death itself can keep us from God’s love. Even when we cannot feel the truth of these words, God’s love is there for us. Let this be our consolation today, and always, in the midst of whatever desolation we are feeling.

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