The Soul's Thirst for God – Br. Curtis Almquist

If you were to open up the magazine that comes with today’s Boston Globe and New York Times, you will find many promises. Many of the promises are quite subliminal, and yet they clearly tap a need. And the need is not necessarily for the product, but rather for the experience you will realize if you possess the product (guarantee). If you drink Coca Cola you get “the real thing” or Gatorade, all your thirst will be quenched. Diamonds, as we know, are a foretaste of eternity; they’re forever. Wearing Calvin Klein clothes and fragrances will make you ravishing, adored. If you use an AT&T calling card, your family will be reconciled and live happily together, forever. Drive a Buick and you get the ride of the century. If you travel to Mauritius, it will all come together…. On and on it goes.

From a marketing or psychological perspective, we could analyze the ads and come up with “what’s really being sold?” and we would be right on the mark, I would bet. Our need to belong, our need for self-esteem and for quite personal and unique recognition; our need to be attractive and desired, our need to appear successful, in part because we are better; our longing for immortality… or at least to be young and wrinkle-free, tuckless, forever. Those whose business it is to market, understand that we’re all looking for something more. I think it’s true.

If we go a step deeper, deeper than the marketing strategy and psychological insight, to speak the language of the soul… I would say that this stuff “works,” that what we see purveyed in Sunday magazines, on the commercials in between the touchdowns, on the pop-ups that show up on the internet, on the billboards, store windows, and on the sides of buses… the reason it all “works,” is because the souldoes crave for something more because we’ve been created in the image of God, who is more. And, I would say, if we don’t seek to satisfy our infinite longing for what is more, on what is more, we will settle on something that is less… and we will work out our infinite cravings relentlessly. C. S. Lewis in a sermon entitled, “The Weight of Glory,” preached at Oxford University, says: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing… They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” We long for the source.

The psalm appointed for today, Psalm 63, begins with the words,

“O God, you are my God; eagerly I see you;

My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,

As in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”

Many people today would not use this language… explicitly… but I do think this is the common language of the soul, longing for what is infinitely more, who is God:

“O God, you are my God; eagerly I see you;

My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,

As in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”

If what I am suggesting here is right, right to you, rings true, that you long for more, how would you tap the source of what is more, who is God? I’ll suggest three practices which run counter to a consumer culture which is constantly alluring us, teasing us to fill up, to gorge, on something that is jumbo, a whopper, guaranteed to satisfy… It may sate your tummy for awhile… but not your soul. Here’s three counter-cultural practices.

The word “fast” is very common in everyday parlance, but usually as an adjective. We go fast. To go slow is un-American. Curiously enough, “going fast” – traveling or working fast, or having a fast connection to the internet – that kind of fast comes from the same etymological root as the verb, “to fast,” “fasting,” in the sense of abstaining from food or something else. Our word “fast” comes from the Old English fæsten, which denoted “firm,” such as “to hold fast” to some decision or driving principle. “Hold fast.” We also may talk about a “a long, fast friend,” meaning someone who has been a secure friend, someone who has been tight with you – a steadfast friend. This word “fast” came to be a verb, applied to the abstinence of food, because of one’s “holding fast to a particular observance,” which was a firm resolve. This etymological development in English seems consistent to the way the scriptures speak about fasting. Fasting, not in the sense of eliminating something or denying yourself of some food, but fasting in the sense of holding firm, of fastening our resolve to a kind of discipline or practice. Fasting: more an affirmation of some value rather than a renunciation of some desire.

That’s my first suggestion. Rather than living into the marketing delusion that “you can have it all,” and that you can have it now, and that you should have it now, that you open some space in your soul, and love the emptiness. Listen to your desire, which is where God will come knocking on the door of your soul. Try out some ways you can live with the word “fast” not just as an adjective – which is about speed – but also the word “fast” as a verb – which is about space. Fast from food, from compulsive worrying, from endless controlling, from multi-tasking, from binging in whatever form. Love the emptiness. Real time is a much, much deeper reality than a news cast on CNN. The author, Wayne Muller, writes “All life has emptiness at its core.” He says, “It is the quiet hollow reed through which the wind of God blows and makes the music that is our life. All creation springs from emptiness.”i Love the emptiness.

To believe is not ultimately to wrap your brain around some existential concept. To believe is to embrace something with your heart, as if your life depended upon it. The English word believe comes from the same etymological root as the word belove, which is to hold dear, to love deeply. iii Believe; belove. So go deeper. Get out of the confusions of your head and go deeper into your heart. Conform your life around the priority and practice of loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Where to start? Start with what is most immediate: yourself. If, inside your soul, you’re yelling at yourself right now: a part of you yelling that you should be better or different and the other part of you saying that this is the way it is and you’re doing the best you can…. If there’s a part of you that’s not on speaking terms with another part of you. If there’s something unforgiven or seemingly unforgivable in your past… well, you need to get over this. And you may need some help. But you’re worth it. And you’re not going to be able to love your neighbor any better than you love yourself. And I think that the love of God – your love of God and God’s love of you – will become very present and very real as you sort out these other two loves: for yourself and for your neighbor.

Love the emptiness; believe less; gather up the fragments. And then, back to the psalm appointed for today, Psalm 63. We hear the psalmist pray, “and under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice.”vi If you are in the dark about something just now – something about your life in the present or past or future – and there’s nothing you can do about it, then confidently wait with it. Wait in the shadow, the shadow of God’s wings, knowing that God knows what you do not know and, perhaps, in the fullness of time you will know more. But in the meantime you know what you are able to bear. Confidently, patiently wait with that assurance. As the psalmist prays, “For you have been my helper, and under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice. My soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.”vii

i Wayne Muller in Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest. Muller, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, is the founder of Bread for the Journey, a nationwide relief organization, and TREAT, a community-based AIDS research and care group. He has authored several other books.

ii Matthew 22:36-40.

iii The word believe comes from the Old English belyfan, from the “Proto-Germanic” (the hypothetical prehistoric ancestor of all Germanic languages, including English) ga-laubjan “to hold dear, to love.”

iv A phrase of Jesus, remembered in John’s gospel 6:12-13.

v The phrase “… the eyes of your heart be enlightened” taken from Ephesians 1:17-19

vi Psalm 63:7.

vii Psalm 63:7-8.