Yearning
Like my body craves sugary donuts and caffeinated energy drinks, my soul has a craving. I sit all day and crave justice and mercy, absolution and vindication, resolution to all of my life’s little problems and communion with my God (whether I realize it or not). My body craves nourishment, deep down, but settles for quick hits of sugar and caffeine. When I feed my body a nice rib-eye steak, it settles into a kind of calm that can only come from being fed well. But donuts give me just a little hit of that same fed-feeling, and they’re cheaper and easier to get ahold of--like, no cooking involved--so I find myself going to that well and drawing water a little too often.
Likewise, there are ways of getting quick hits of absolution, vindication, feeling right. Hop on social media, scroll until you find an idea you hate (won’t take long), click on the person’s profile and deep-dive into their world and their mind, and let any perceived dysfunction or deficiency in them make you feel better about yourself. Turn on Fox News and listen to total bull- for half an hour. Raving about this or that. Let Tucker Carlson fill your mind with images of anarchy and chaos in streets, or with conspiracy theories about the liars and perverts in government (they generate enough evil on their own that we don’t have to imagine any greater conspiracies; also, in order to conspire, they’d have to work together, and all of them have egos which are too big for that).
You’ll find that there’s a microdose of vindication in the little truths with which you’re fed big lies, like a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. You’ll find there’s a quick hit of the things we all crave, deep down: Truth, goodness, and beauty. You’ll hear half-truths, you’ll know mob-justice, you’ll see the kind of beauty with which mausoleums are beautiful: White-washed, and ornately covering our inner death.
Deep down, we crave truth, goodness, and beauty. The three-fold meta-ethic by which all reality came into being and is continually governed--no, held. You may not know it but you crave the embodiment of truth, goodness, and beauty. You don’t crave these abstract concepts in their abstraction, you crave them in the literalest of senses. You crave the truth of a court which arbitrates matters fairly, stating the facts honestly, and executing justice swiftly. You crave the goodness of a dinner table with plenty, of conversation with laughter and tears, of intimacy in community--feeling seen and feeling heard and feeling fed. You crave the beauty of a mountain in its majestic splendor, of a vast ocean in its mystery, or the body of your lover with all the delicious imperfections here and there which make her her and which teach her story to you.
Like a deer pants for water, Lord, so my soul longs for you. I’m desperately parched. I’m starving. I need an image of you that I can savor. I need an experience of you that I can hang my hat on--rely on--that I can look back on and know that you have been with me. I need your shoulder, to cry on. Christ, I need your arms to wrap me up, like a lover. I want to fall asleep in your bosom like a nursing child; I want you to hold me, nestle me, guard me. You’re a great and formless God. Spirit, take the form of a mother, to keep me. I want to walk with you. I need a God who has legs to march through this hell with me. Father, walk behind me, holding the bicycle seat and gently letting me know that you’re there to keep me upright. My one-in-three, three-in-one, I need you as the embodiment of truth, goodness, and beauty. There are no higher virtues I can think of. There’s nothing, this morning, that can satisfy like you. I need you.
Amen.