One of the spiritual maladies which is pestering men and women of nowadays is undoubtedly rejection. The latter knows no frontiers. It is found everywhere human beings dwell and gather, be it in families, churches, communities, social clubs and so forth. After noticing the terrible plight rejection was impinging in the hearts and minds of India’s castoff children, Mother Teresa was led to conclude: “The worst illness of today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but the sense of being unwanted, of not being loved, of being abandoned”.
Rejection is a silent killer of any motivation and hope. It deadens every initiative aimed at improving the life of oneself together with her/his fellow men and women. Rejection makes one believe the lie that no matter how much hard one tries she/he will never arrive at reaching his/her life goals. How can we combat the feeling of being unwanted and unaccepted?
In the Bible there is the notable story of the Samaritan woman. By the standards of the society of her time she was a complete failure and a classic outcast. None of her five marriages came to fruition. It seems that for all intents and purposes she was used and thrown away in the wastepaper basket of prejudice and contempt. She found her healing by meeting Jesus, the God-Man, who offered her his unconditional and accepting love. Jesus was courageous enough to tell her through his loving care, “You are worth of my attention. You belong to me”.
David Whyte wrote: “There is no house like the house of belonging”. A rejected heart that is opened for God’s ever welcoming heart will soon realise that deep down, what is really important in life is the realisation that God’s faithful love for us, human beings, will never run short. It is such a perseverant love which, inspite of what come across along the way, will keep us going in the end. The Bible is a sure reminder of this indelible truth. “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish” (Matt 18, 12-14). The good news is that in God’s acceptance, we become all the more acquainted and familiar with the healing realisation that He is our beloved Father and we are his beloved children. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 Jn 3, 1). Is there any greater medicine that can effectively heal our wounded hearts from rejection more than this certainty?
As John Powell put it, “human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection”. By putting our complete trust in God we shall be finding the much needed solace that our hearts are craving for. As St Augustine wisely noted: “He loves each one of us, as if there were only one of us”. God’s undivided and individual attention for us makes us exclaim with the characteristic and exuberant conviction of the American film star Sylvester Stallone: “I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.”
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap