i need God

I am weary in almost every way. From disappointing myself, and others, from misrepresenting that which is so important to me; weary of not being enough husband for my partner, father for my son, pastor for my community, colleague for my faculty, teacher for my students, writer for my publisher, citizen for my city, me for me. Shoot I am weary of my self-shaming, and this assumption that I should be something other than what and who I am. I am weary.

So I began my day reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s classic book; Prayer. Here’s a quote that caused pause.

“This looking to God is contemplation. It is looking inward into the depths of the soul, and hence beyond the soul toward God. The more contemplation finds God, the more it forgets itself and yet discovers itself in him. This unwavering ‘beholding’, moreover, is also and always a ‘hearing’, because what is beheld is the free and infinite Person who, from the depths of freedom, can give himself in a way that is ever new, unsuspected and unpredictable. Therefore the word of God is never something finished, to be surveyed like a particular landscape, but it is something new every moment, like water from a spring or rays of light. ‘And so it is not enough to have received insight and to know the testimonies of God, if we do not continually receive and become inebriated by the fountain of eternal light.’ The lover already knows this; the beloved’s face and voice are every moment as new as if he had never seen them before. But the being of God, which is revealed to us in his word, is not only for eyes of the lover.”

von Balthasar, 1955, p. 24-5

I love this and yet I find myself, in my weary condition, with a sense that revelation is past, that the babbling brook has become a mosquito breeding ground, and that any rays of light are so faint that one could nearly mistake them for darkness itself.

Holy Spirit, I find myself in a place where I thirst and I long to see. Lead me to peaceful streams, and renew my soul. Open my eyes, again, to see the newness of the Creator, in my places of weariness. I voice this in connection with my Lord Jesus Christ; my reconciling friend, who keeps inviting me to seek, and know; to taste and see. O that I might.

peace, dwight