Rejection - the dementor of the muggle world - and the only true patronus

Rejection might just be the most painful thing we experience as human beings – setting aside gallstones and giving birth. To be unwanted, unchosen unloved. Like a dementor, it seems to suck some part of your soul out through your ribs and leaves you feeling utterly and unbearably empty.

But at the same time, it is, in a way, what makes being human possible. Because without the other person having a real choice, it means nothing to be chosen. We wouldn’t understand what it was to be ‘wanted’ in a world where ‘unwanted’ didn’t exist. Love cannot exist without unlove.

And it’s more than that – maybe without rejection, God couldn’t be God. Why do I say that? I was reading John’s first letter in the bible recently, and there’s a bit where I honestly weep sometimes when I read it. (It’s 1 John 4:7-12 if you care about such things.) First it says that God is love. That’s who God is. And then it defines love: ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Sin, basically, is when we reject God. So love is God’s response to rejection. That is what true love is. And it’s the very fibre of God’s being.

Jesus once asked his disciples, “Why is it written that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected?” Well I think Jesus had to “suffer much and be rejected” to be truly like God. Because to be God is to suffer much and be rejected. And for us to become like God – to be children truly like our Dad – we too must be rejected. In order for us to truly love. And this rejected love is not that of the stalker – the hand snatching what it can from that which it ‘loves’ – it is the love of the father, sitting up all night, waiting for his runaway daughter to come home. ‘Jesus, how many nights should I wait for her? A week?’  - ‘I tell you, not seven night but seventy seven nights.’ Do not stop waiting. Do not stop loving. Because every night you will know more what it feels like to be God. The father who sits, and waits, and weeps, and knows that some of his children are never going to come home.