A spiritual director said to me last week, “It sounds as though you are spiritually weary.” “What does being spiritually weary look like?” I asked. “Having too many notions,” she said.
I had just told her I was looking into being an associate with the Order of Julian of Norwich, painting the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and saying the Daily Offices. We speak only by telephone now and I wonder if she smiled as she spoke.
I smile now as I see myself struggling through the dark toward the spiritual life like a last lighting beetle of summer.
Reading poetry has helped me feel more connected to God and others lately than any new practice. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and priest who I think also exhausted himself at times by excess of notions, seems to have worked his way through darkness by light of his writing.
My own heart let me more have pity on
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
We read Hopkins in our last poetry workshop at the Cathedral. If you would like to join us for A Retreat with the Poems of George Herbert, an evening Dean’s Forum with poetry, or a journey with the poems of W.H. Auden, click on the titles to register.
“Jackself,” from what I gather, is a made-up word with which the speaker gently chides himself as a mere human who cannot, who ought not, try to wring a smile from God. “Jackself” reminds me of “Brother Ass”— what St. Francis called his body—his way of his gently embracing his human tendency toward self-absorption.
“Finding God in all things” is what St. Ignatius directed others to do. If you have lived in this world without asking yourself to see God’s presence in its horrors, and in your private misery, and you begin to prostrate your mind before these things and watch for God, it will change the way you see these things.
Holding this practice is to be as the lighting beetle of late summer who seeks the true source of light until its death. Many of us have spent much of our lives exhausting ourselves trying to find ourselves in all things. By seeking rather to find God in all things, we become free from self-absorption, and might find ourselves loving anyone.
But claiming a religion of love when we have no thirst for the font of love in Jesus Christ, God’s only perfect son poured out in death for the chronically spiritually dehydrated, is like trying to wring a smile from God. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes. Often the best thing we can do is to look within and name our thirst.
Where was God in this past week—from where did true life flow? I saw and heard God in a mother, Julia Blake, whose son Jacob Jr. was shot by police on Sunday. She used her tragic momentary spotlight to ask for prayer and to prophesy to the world.
As we read in Isaiah, God also talks about love when anguished over how what we do does not reflect God or God’s family. You can see and hear Julia Blake give her full statement HERE. Let us pray we recognize our thirst in her words.
