Psalm 143: 6-7 (RSV)
I stretch out my hands to thee;
my soul thirsts for thee like a parched land.
Make haste to answer me, O Lord!
My spirit fails!
Hide not thy face from me,
lest I be like those who go down to the Pit.
Devotion
Religion is sometimes characterized by critics as a crutch for weak people—people who find it difficult to deal with life’s tougher challenges without the consolations provided by faith in a benevolent deity. That may be true in some cases. But I don’t think such a view does justice at all to the lived experience of those who are in fact devout—especially those who have robust spiritual lives of the sort we encounter in the Bible. For as spiritual life is portrayed there, it is no bed of roses. It has its satisfying and even exhilarating moments, to be sure. But just as often it is also a source of pain and suffering.
I cannot claim personal experience on this matter, but the witness of those whom I regard as exemplary figures (John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Simone Weil, etc.), in both Scripture and the history of the Christian religion, is that spiritual life is a struggle with many twists and turns—down as well as up. The aim is communion with God, and that is what the sort of people I have in mind have always sought to experience. But they have found that their striving can only yield so much. If they do in fact experience anything like what they are looking for, it can only be because God chooses to make himself available to them.
That does not always happen, needless to say. Nor is there any guarantee it will endure once it has been experienced. No matter how intensely communion with God may be desired, sometimes it is just not available. And once it has been experienced, it can be fleeting. So it is often mainly the absence of God’s presence the supplicant ends up experiencing. The Bible is full of testimony that this is the case, as is the witness of many of the great exemplars of spirituality in the history of our religion.
Christian spirituality is best understood, therefore, as a kind of struggle, and the more seriously it is pursued, the more intense the struggle tends to be. So it is hardly a recipe for an untroubled existence. Why, then, go to the trouble of pursuing it? Part of the answer is surely that even a taste of what is being sought is so uplifting that it makes all the trouble worthwhile. But I think an even better explanation is provided by St. Augustine’s famous assertion at the beginning ofhis Confessions that “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
As profound as I believe the idea St. Augustine was seeking to express in this statement, however, I think it is incomplete. To my Reformed Protestant ears, at least, it sounds one-sided. For in our tradition, spirituality has usually been understood as a partner of active engagement inthe affairs of the world. It is activist in a worldly manner, in other words, because that is what we believe God intends for us to do with the time and talents he has given us. Indeed, that is how we experience God: we find him to be actively at work in human affairs. So even in those moments when we are most aware of his presence in our lives, we find ourselves being led to take action in ways that embody our faith.
Prayer
You know us better than we know ourselves, O Lord. So you understand better than any of us does why our spirits are drawn to you—and also why we so often find it difficult to satisfy the yearnings that take us in that direction. But we trust that these yearnings are part of your plan for us, and as much as we want them to be fulfilled, we also are confident that you want us to take part actively in your work in the world. Help us to do that effectively. Amen.
Bruce Douglass