“As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”
- Psalm 42:1-2
I think we get the idea of spiritual thirst wrong.
We tend to think of it as a residing, effortless passion for God. When most people think of longing, thirsting or desiring God they think of an emotionally charged thirst and usually the hyper-positive, “highly spiritual” perfect Christian kind.
But that’s not how I experience thirst and I’d like to argue it’s not how the psalmists did either. At least not the writer of Psalm 42.
Here in this psalm the writer is praying not his fullness, but his dehydration. He’s likening his longing for God to being in a wilderness without water. His thirst springs from his lack, his very awareness of what he doesn’t have, his desperation to drink what obviously feels inaccessible to him in that moment.
And he’s not the only one. Think of the one time Jesus cries out in thirst. It’s not in the wilderness while he was fasting, or to the Samaritan woman at the well when he asks for a drink. It’s on the cross - His place of greatest emptiness, pain and shame. His greatest physical thirst matching his deepest spiritual longing - the healing of the world.
Thirsting for God then, isn’t so much about the mountain tops of our prayer lives as it is the valleys. It’s not so much about a fullness as a realisation of our emptiness. True spiritual desire springs out of the desert, not the rainforest. Thirst is a desperate recognition of our lack.
What’s beautiful about this is that it gifts our aching for God back to everyone, not just those we consider “hyper-spiritual”. It’s given back to the suffering, the low, the poor in spirit, the humble. It becomes about embracing our need as the very vehicle for which we experience God in the first place.
Thirsting for God isn’t about being pious, it’s about being honest. It’s a recognition of our spiritual poverty.
But it also means that deep down, whether we realise it or not, we all thirst. Because we are all dehydrated by this world with its suffering, brokenness, emptiness and war. Communion therefore, and desiring God, is far more about taking time to realise our thirst than it is about stirring it up. It’s about acknowledging and naming our areas of pain and lack so that we may welcome the power and love of God’s infilling there.
I would argue that the trouble isn’t that we’re not spiritually longing enough, it’s that we’re out of touch with ourselves. We don’t know we long with the intensity that we really do.
Thirst for God is so much deeper than feelings, emotions and passions. If those things are the springs of our lives thirsting is the aquifer beneath feeding them from its ancient reservoir. Down there in the caverns is the very longing from which all our wants flow from - our imaged after God desire for eternal engulfment in love.
Touching our thirst is about touching that space, something we don’t always know how to do.
That’s what ‘Feeling Our Thirst: A Guided Prayer Meditation’ is about (if you’re a subscriber you can listen early now. If not check out the Beholding Prayer Podcast next week). Not stirring up extra passion for God out of stubborn willpower, but reaching the very deepest cry of our being that already exists, unbeknownst to us in the recesses of our being.
It’s about practicing turning there, so that our longing can spring up from within us into a loving awareness of Love and His desire to fill us.
Desire for God moves from the deep up and the good news is that right down there, in the darkest places of ourselves where the longing is most potent, the Holy Spirit is dwelling. Groaning Himself for our engulfulment into the Trinity who made and relentlessly pursues us.
Right there, in the quiet, deep self, God is praying and longing too.
And He’s waiting for you to simply turn toward Him.
May this guided prayer lead you
into that loving gaze,
to open up where it matters,
to drink from God.
All my love,
Strahan.
My new book Thirsting: Quenching Our Soul’s Deepest Desire comes out October 1st. You can pre-order it today here for New Zealand / Australia and here for the US or from wherever good books are sold in your region.
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