On Loving Those Who Ghost Us

For a year and a half, I couldn’t listen to the radio. Every song was haunted by a memory. I’d hear the first few notes of a song like “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar and I’d be catapulted into my preteen years, belting out the lyrics into a shared hairbrush microphone during a sleepover with my best friend. Ever since she’d sent the text rendering her my “ex” best friend, these sweet childhood memories had become tarnished. The heartbreak of her rejection was like a reverse King Midas, turning all our golden memories to ash.

My childhood best friend, maid of honor at my wedding, and closest thing I’d ever had to a sister had ghosted me before finally ending our friendship with a text message following two years of silence. Why? While I was a “beautiful person,” my Catholic convictions and the way I wrote about them publicly were “detrimental to her mental health”—despite my best efforts to speak the truth with compassion. While we had always taken pride in the deep roots that allowed us to engage in meaningful discussions on emotional topics on which we deeply disagreed, something had shifted. I was now “unsafe,” a threat to her psyche. To be well, she’d decided she needed to cut me out of her life.

I was shocked and wounded. The primary descriptor of the girl I’d grown up with was “loyal.” Sure, in young adulthood she’d fallen into a pattern of ignoring me while she lost herself in a string of codependent relationships, but she’d always come back when she needed a shoulder to cry on. During her two-year silence, I prayed for her, always assuming she’d be back.

I thought I was praying for her to come back to the Faith. I was praying for her to return to our friendship. I was praying for reconciliation. I was ready and waiting, hoping to be the image of the Father, welcoming her home. Not once had it occurred to me that I would be cut out of her life forever.

A Pervasive Ailment

My experience is, sadly, not isolated. As Noelle Mering chronicles in her book No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them, more than 68 million Americans are estranged from close family members. Those numbers don’t even include friends who were like family, as in my case. Our culture is sick with a pandemic of loneliness, yet we are drinking the snake oil of an ideology that insists that isolation and abandonment—rather than communication and reconciliation—are the remedy.

Many of us ghosted Christians are feeling the full force of Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me” (Matthew 5:11) and His warning from Matthew 10:22, “Everyone will hate you because you follow me.” Painful as it is, the rejection of those close to us does not stop our flow of love for them; nor does it negate our responsibility to pray for them. If anything, this responsibility intensifies: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Still, the question remains: How do we love those who want nothing to do with us?

Spiritual Adoption

When someone has wronged us, it can be difficult to see past the pain that they have caused us. One practice that helps cultivate authentic love while honoring Christ’s call to pray for our enemies is spiritual adoption. Spiritual adoption is simply the practice of pledging to pray for a particular soul. This practice is most often associated with praying for a child and mother in danger of abortion, but it can be adapted whenever we feel the tug of the Holy Spirit to intercede for another soul in a particular way.

The grace of praying for our enemies—or nasty neighbors, trying coworkers, or meddlesome gossips—is that God’s grace is at work transforming our hearts as well. As we make the commitment to spiritually adopt those who have wronged us, we may find that our hearts soften toward them and that God allows us to see our adoptee with His eyes and feel with His heart. This may not ease the pain of rejection, but it does encourage us to lay down our anger, inviting the fruits of the Spirit—gentleness, faithfulness, patience—to flourish in their place.

Offer It Up

First, we can offer up the pain they cause us for their own spiritual benefit. As St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Colossians, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am supplementing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions in behalf of His body, which is the church” (1:24). As Catholics, we know that we have been given the profound spiritual capacity to unite our sufferings to Christ’s and that “In all things, God works for the good of those who love him,” (Romans 8:28). The pain that they have caused us, when offered up to the Lord, has profound spiritual power to intercede on their behalf. Our pain transforms into grace as we pray along with Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Sit in the Garden

One prayer practice we can enter into when facing profound rejection is to sit with Jesus in the Agony in the Garden. As Pope Leo writes in Magnifica Humanitas, “When we face rejection…or the loss of a loved one…mysteriously, it is in precisely such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others, and encounter the presence of the Lord” (MH 119). A good friend relayed the reflection of his faithful mother as she lay dying: “I am sharing in Jesus’ suffering, and He is sharing in mine.”

Suffering offers us an entry into deeper intimacy with Christ. Sitting with Jesus in the garden allows us a meditative communion with the Lord in the mystery of our suffering. Pope Leo goes on to say that we are called not to deny our interior suffering but to integrate it: “To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering” (MH 120).

Visualize Our Sacred Hearts

Another prayer practice for uniting ourselves more closely to Jesus in our pain is to visualize our own hearts transposed on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The heart represents the love of Jesus for us, and we can hold it in the love we have for those who have abandoned us. As we visualize the crown of thorns, we can meditate on the painful barbs that have come our way—not rejecting them but receiving them deeper, embracing wounds of love for the sake of their salvation.

As we visualize the divine light emanating from the Sacred Heart, we can pray that the Holy Spirit illuminate the darkness of those who, through their own rejection, have rendered themselves far from the light. As we visualize the blood dripping from the wound, we can meditate on the Lord’s grace poured out through the immolation of our desire to be well regarded. Finally, as we contemplate the Cross, we can pray that the Lord send us the grace to carry ours when we are able—and our own Simon of Cyrene when we are not.

Surrender to the Saints

Another spiritual response to rejection is to surrender our loved ones to the care of a particular Saint. It is said that we don’t choose the Saints but that the Saints choose us. The friend who abandoned me is a fallen-away Catholic. Her mother endured 10 years of infertility before asking for Mary’s intercession. As soon as she invoked Our Lady, she conceived my friend. I was a skeptical Protestant at the time I heard this story repeated again and again growing up, but it imprinted on my mind. In the wake of this friend leaving both me and the Church, I have been known to demand—perhaps a little too vehemently—that Mary bring our girl back to her Son.

In prayerfully discerning which Saint to ask to intercede for your loved one, you might invoke your loved one’s patron Saint from Confirmation, or the patron of his profession. Of course, the quintessential Saint for those who have fallen away is St. Monica, mother of Casanova-turned-saint Augustine. For many years, she watched helplessly as he lived a life of debauchery. But her unceasing prayers were heard, as he eventually not only converted but became a bishop, Church Father, and Doctor of the Church. When the ache grows strong, remember Monica and pray.

Hope into Eternity

Above all, do not lose hope. Rather, trust in the hidden work of the Spirit. As country star Blake Shelton sings in his new song “Let Him in Anyway,” it isn’t over until it’s over—and even then, as Catholics we have the hopeful doctrine of Purgatory. We entrust every soul to the mercy of God. Even after death, our prayers echo into eternity, where they assist those undergoing purification. So, pray, hope, and don’t worry; life is long and eternity is longer.