Introduction
One can begin one’s [spiritual] quest by attending to the desires of the heart, both personal and communal. The Spirit is revealed in our genuine hopes for ourselves and for the world. How brightly burns the flame of desire for a love affair with God, other people, the world? Do we know that to desire and seek God is a choice that is always available to us?
Elizabeth Dreyer
Years ago, I sat in a staff meeting at a church I was serving; the purpose of the meeting was to talk about how we could attract more people to join the church. At one point someone counted the requirements for church membership that were already in place and made the startling discovery that somewhere between five and nine time commitmentsper week were required of those who wanted to become church members!
Outwardly I tried to be supportive of the purpose for the meeting, but on the inside I was screaming,Who would want to sign up for this? I was already becoming aware of CFS (Christian fatigue syndrome) in my own life and couldn’t imagine willingly inflicting it on someone else.
The clarity that dawned in this moment caused me to start being a little more honest about what my own Christian life had been reduced to. While I was trying harder and doing more, there was a yawning emptiness underneath it all that no amount of activity, Christian or otherwise, could fill. It made no difference at all that I had been a Christian all of my conscious life, that I had been in vocational Christian ministry since early adulthood or that I was busy responding to what appeared to be God-given opportunities to become involved in many worthy causes. The more I refused to acknowledge the longing for more, the deeper and wider the emptiness became—until it threatened to swallow me up. In the midst of such barrenness, it was hard to even imagine what Jesus might have meant when he said, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). My responses to sermons and devotional reflections on this verse were cynical at best. The Christian life just didn’t feel that way to me.
It was hard to know where to go to talk about such uncomfortable realities. Life in and around the Christian community does little to help us attend to our longings, to believe that deep within there is something essential that needs to be listened to, or to offer much hope that our deepest longings could take us somewhere good. At times the deeper longings of our heart are dismissed as mere idealism—beyond the realm of possibility this side of heaven. At other times, subtle fear or outright discomfort arises in the face of such expressions of our humanity. The emphasis on human depravity in many religious circles makes it hard to know if there is anything in us that can be trusted.
Sometimes the language of longing is used to stir the emotions of a crowd, but most often what is offered in response is found wanting in the end. Our longing for love is met with relationships that are fairly utilitarian and prone to fall apart under pressure. Our longing for healing and transformation is met with self-help messages that leave us briefly inspired and yet burdened by the pressure of trying to fix ourselves with some new technique or skill. Our longing for a way of life that works is most often met with an invitation to more activity, which unfortunately plays right into our compulsions and the drivenness of Western culture.
My first response to this awareness of longing was to try tweaking my schedule, learning how to say no more decisively, adopting new time management tools. But there comes a time when desire is so deep that mere tweaking is not enough. Finally I just gave in to it all, making the choice to radically reorder my life to listen to the longings of my heart and arrange my life for spiritual seeking. This was a time of utter openness, of questioning almost everything, of letting many of the outward trappings of my life—particularly my spiritual life—fall away until the deepest longings, those that are embedded in the very essence of our humanity, began to be revealed in all of their raw beauty and power. The longing for significance, the longing for love, the longing for deep and fundamental change, the longing for a way of life thatworks, the longing to connect experientially and even viscerally with Someone beyond ourselves—these longings led me to search out spiritual practices and establish life rhythms that promised something more.
Opening to the Myster
