That Old Longing
Seeking peace and quiet, I wandered into the Methodist temple on Clark, where I soon found myself flipping through a hymnal. The lyrics are so familiar. It is an alarming comfort, or a comfortable alarm, to realize that Catholic and Protestant rites and songs have so much in common – that, in fact, so many of our songs are the same. “As the deer longs for flowing streams…” Perusing these hymns aroused an old, forgotten, presumed-dead twinge in my heart. I felt that longing in my heartstrings, the soul’s reaching out to God: I wanted to believe, to feel that connection again, wanted it so much that the sensation resembled resistance more than longing. But then I flipped to other hymns – can I really believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and more, that he died to save our sins? No. I’ve stopped believing one can ransom another, let alone assume the guilt of all who ever lived. We make our salvation or redemption. We are our damnation or our salvation.
But what of God? What of creation, of that faith, of the belief in love and the rightness of the soul’s longing for the divine? Been thinking about the mystic’s dream a lot lately, and about how I used to dream it, used to want nothing more than to spend eternity at God’s feet, transfixed by the beauty of the Divine. It is a beautiful thought, colored with something terrifying and vast. What abysses did I – do I – harbor that I seek such annihilation, such infinities, such absolutes?
I incline towards God when I am empty. I have been stripped once again. It is hard to get away from feeling like a husk, from feeling like something pretty and hollow, maybe like one of those brightly painted papier-mâché eggs. How and with what am I looking to God to fill me? Is that a sexual metaphor? Aw, God, you old slyboots. Is the mystic’s longing really just the fever dream of a thwarted nymphomaniac?
