Embedded Files
When Rejection Is all that remains
When Rejection Is all that remains
What happens when the doors once believed to open in time simply remain shut?
When the one on the other side who is “supposed” to answer appears unmoved by the knocking, or worse, when what was imagined as welcome reveals itself as something predatory, ready to strip away every hope carried into it?
For many, such a reality feels distant, a looming shadow that never fully takes form. An unease managed through distraction, noise, and the endless scroll of temporary relief.
But for others, the doors simply remain shut. The weight of the isolation persists, not occasionally, but continuously. Whatever, or whoever, stands as a gatekeeper continues to offer no negotiations with any pain or loss.
This is not a story of the celebrated.
This is not a story of the celebrated.
It is not for those who move through life with ease, where even small gestures are met with boundless opportunity. It is instead the account of the forgotten, the dismissed, those who no longer register within a system that once promised them a place of belonging. The ones who, against all societal expectations, simply refuse to disappear.
The promise they were raised upon is familiar. Do your best, obtain the degree, work hard, and build something stable. A home will follow. A family. A life that makes sense. Trust the system. Salvation lies just beyond the horizon... The so-called American Dream.
What is not always understood, however, is that the world does not necessarily exist to fulfill that promise. In many cases, it does not exist to honor it at all. Instead, ambition is often reshaped under pressure, refined into something usable, or discarded entirely. Dreams are not always met with passage forward, but with forces that stubbornly commit to alter their direction entirely.
What is presented as a path to stability can, over time, resemble something far less certain, a simplified narrative used to guide individuals forward without ever revealing the full structure beneath it. Security, as it was imagined, often proves more conditional than expected, dependent on systems that absorb effort unevenly and return outcomes inconsistently.
This is not a story of societal acceptance. It is a story of silent confrontation.
This is not a story of societal acceptance. It is a story of silent confrontation.
The modern workforce often reflects a system that sustains itself by displacing the consequences of its failures onto those who both embody and perpetuate that same system. From this perspective, “jobs” appear less as unified structures of opportunity and more as a persistent cycles of wealth extraction and class-based exclusions, mirrored in economic tension and perpetual political division, with no clear resolution in sight.
When a person cannot find work in even the most basic labor due to being classified as a “risk,” the question of societal placement becomes unavoidable. Where does one go to when they are filtered out at every level of self-sustainable belonging? What becomes of those processed through systems that remove viability without acknowledging presence? And who, in such a structure, is willing to be held accountable for all those human beings willing to serve such a system, and simply being discarded like trash?
In such conditions, which often reflect a sense of hopeless self analysis, attention often turns to the only remaining source that might still offer some semblance of care.
In these sorts of moments, attention naturally turns toward God.
Yet even this introduces further questions. Who is God within such a world? Is He the single source of all meaning, or simply the echo of our need to find it? Is He present in the silence, or far from it?
When the weight of existence itself presses inward, is that consequent pressure on agency, a tax passed down from something divine, or simply the excruciating cost of being human itself?
These are not abstract questions. They are lived ones. And they require response not only from the individual, but from the world that participates in forming them.
Because if humanity itself reflects something greater, what does it signify when that reflection is simply cast aside?
Because if humanity itself reflects something greater, what does it signify when that reflection is simply cast aside?
There are key moments of looking back across hundreds of carefully crafted job applications and work proposals, each one an attempt to participate, to contribute, to remain visible. And yet the responses seem to remain consistent: silence, rejection, indifference. Over time, such patterns can begin to be internalized as something that resembles a verdict cast on being itself.
Worthless.
But if a system already fractured by its own spiritual shortcomings decides to reject a person, what does that rejection truly indicate?
But if a system already fractured by its own spiritual shortcomings decides to reject a person, what does that rejection truly indicate?
From a theological perspective, is this kind of worldly rejection itself not just an inverted kind of accolade?
Perhaps the language starts to become fragmented here. Questions circling rather than concluding. Thoughts resting in tension rather than resolution. A quiet form of anger finding an outlet, but which only exists in the gaps between articulation and silence.
Perhaps that is all that remains when a belief in true freedom encounters a rather bleak reality systemically marked by limitation, uncertainty, and perpetual decay.
There was once a belief that the world could respond, not only to existence but to its offering, not only to presence but to its voice.
A figure on a hilltop who wished only to sing a Song of Deliverance and to be heard.
And whom was struck down, like a lamb to the slaughter, only to rise again.
For the True Martyrs,
J.D. McCali
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse