Thursday of the 3rd Week of Lent

I began this piece on March 12th, so today’s reflection was spawned by Psalm 42 from Monday’s liturgy. It gives voice to that deep inclination within the human person called longing or yearning. It is one of my favorite psalms.

As a deer longs for running streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
(Psalm 42:1-2)

Although it is one of the more unheralded spiritual qualities, longing is an integral part of becoming human and holy. It is too inchoate and modest to sit in the front pew with faith, hope, and charity, but it is too eager and engaged to hang in the back row with the ushers. One reason why longing is either underemphasized or overlooked altogether is that we often fail to recognize it for what it truly is: the soul’s reach for God.

Real longing, soul yearning, comes from a place deeper than simple wants and desires. It is rooted in the soul’s memory of its divine origin. Within every person, deeper than cognition, longing flags our attention at the intersection of our core vulnerabilities, sacred wound, soul image, and unique gift we are meant to bring to the world. As human persons our deepest yearning defies tidy concepts and discursive language. Often expressed positively in and through various art forms, conscious behaviors, and practices (from writing poetry, to painting, to dancing, to gardening, to walking in nature, to centering prayer), it is all too frequently expressed in harmful ways as well.

In daily life, the soul’s longing is intimately related to our deepest wound and to our greatest gift. Since our sacred gift is almost always integrally related to our core wound and vulnerability, we can say the wound is also sacred. Both the wound and the gift are means in and through which the soul reaches for God. The problem is that we tend to be threatened by both our deepest wound and our greatest gift and therefore misinterpret and misunderstand both the meaning of our most natural and sacred longing and the source of it. When we fear, fight, flee, ignore, or fail to discover the deeper meaning of our core vulnerability and gift, whether consciously or unconsciously, we displace onto something or someone else our longing for our original union with God and our yearning for the womb of God’s love.

By way of example, I remember one of my teachers, Gerald May, writing in one of his books about promiscuity, describing what is often reacted to with quick labeling and sweeping, all-knowing moral judgments. As a psychiatrist and a spiritual director well-versed in psychological reactions and religious experience, May suggested instead that ongoing, sexual encounters with random people is a classic experience described by a number of spiritual teachers as frequently the displacement of spiritual passion and love for God. How often each of us have reached for something that did not deliver without realizing the inner urge was really meant to stimulate the soul’s reach for the Holy One.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke encourages us to “go to the limits of your longing” while contemporary poet David Whyte wants to know

if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing.

With the image of a thirsty deer in search of a flowing stream, the psalmist too uses poetry to evoke that deep, dynamic mystery that stirs within each of us. In last Sunday’s Gospel (for the Scrutinies from John 4) Jesus appeals to that same yearning for “living water” in his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. The Samaritan woman is the archetype of human longing and the human propensity to mistake our deepest longing and to transfer it from its true referent to that which cannot ultimately satisfy. “Sir, give me this water,” she says, as she falls into the center of her longing where her most tender wound becomes her most precious gift, where the soul’s reach touches and is touched by what the soul is meant to know and receive.♦

LENTEN PRACTICE:

Take some time to be silent and still. Go to the limits of your longing. What do you find there?

pax, djm