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God Hunger
Discovering the Mystic in All of Us
John Kirvan
192 pages
Sorin Books, 1999
Retail Price: $16.95
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Readers will find fifty meditations and prayers built around the basic elements of classical western spirituality by exploring the lives and writings of ten great spiritual teachers.
C. S. Lewis - Longing
Thomas Merton - Looking
Rumi - Home
Ramon Lull - Foolishness
Gregory of Nyssa - More
Francis of Assisi - Dying
Angelus Silesius - Unknowing
The Kabbalah - Ayin
Hildegran of Bingen - Passion
Evelyn Underhill - Resurrection
There are five experiences for the soul from each of the teachers. Each experience involves the reader in the three great classic prayer forms of western spirituality: mantras, meditations, intercessory prayers.
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from John Kirvan's God Hunger, a spiritual feast that shares what the great mystics sought and found — a direct, love-driven way of knowing God.
It is posted here with permission of Sorin Books, PO Box 1006, Notre Dame, IN 46556. Voice: 219.287.2831, ext 421. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Sorin Books. www.sorinbooks.com.
This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.
— C. S. Lewis
FOR THE FIRST TIME in our adult lives many of us are freely admitting to an aching spiritual emptiness, the full depth of which we are only gradually becoming aware.
The good news is that it is now possible to make this admission without being considered a religious nut — or a psychotic.
The bad news is that "spirituality" is in danger of becoming a meaningless word used to describe anything that can't be tied down, a synonym for warm-fuzziness.
The world-class model hyping her book of beauty hints on TV reduces spirituality to "the big beauty tip of the decade." I have heard others doing the same rounds diminish spirituality to the instant, unquestioning acceptance of a pet, the after-glow of a tennis tournament or the interior decor of a blues club.
We are offered pop psychology, greeting-card wisdom, and gift-book comfort. They are not enough to satisfy the wrenching spiritual hunger that many of us are feeling. “The very best” is no longer good enough. From experience we know we need more than the fix of a self-help book, or even the rewards of the most responsible therapy. We know that the spiritual life we seek goes far beyond and deeper than being well adjusted. We know too that the spirituality for which we hunger is not the same as a renewed morality, that it goes beyond a life of good behavior, kind deeds and motivations. It goes beyond an archeological dig into childhood religion. We need more than talk of "soul" that reduces our spirit to a measure of energy.
We are more than a little weary of spiritual junk food.
We are beginning to realize that we hunger for God and that for far too long we have settled for far too little. This basic, primal hunger for God may be the least recognized and acknowledged aspect of today's highly publicized spiritual quest and our own personal journey.
We want what the great mystics, sought and found — not an occasional comforting word but a perspective shattering, here-and-now glimpse of God — not one more promise of bliss in ten days and ten steps but a here-and-now taste of eternity. Nothing less will satisfy this hunger, too long denied.
THERE WE'VE SAID IT. We have used the word mystic. And if it is true that the word spirituality has been drugged into meaninglessness by overuse and careless use, it is even more true that the word mystic is avoided, consigned to our too-embarrassing-to-use vocabulary. There is, we are inclined to think, something pretentious, precious, even preposterous about applying that word to the desires we feel so deeply in our heart and soul.
This is not new. A little over fifty years ago, E. Allison Peers the translator and biographer of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila noted that the word mystic had for some time "been getting into the wrong company."
For one thing mysticism is consistently and confusedly identified with the highly publicized, easily dramatized special-effects of the spiritual life—rare, exotic phenomena such as levitation and stigmata that mark the lives of some who have sought to live with God. But these effects are not the reward for spiritual success, signs of God's approval, any more than their lack is a mark of spiritual failure, a
sign of God's indifference.
"A mystic," Peers wrote, "is a person who has fallen in love with God. We are not afraid of lovers — no indeed: 'all the world loves a lover.' They attract us by their ardor, their single mindedness, their yearning to be one with the object of their love." Mysticism is nothing more or less than a love-driven way of knowing God that is centered in direct, immediate experience of his presence — or his absence — as contrasted with the efforts of our mind to think through, capture, and describe the object of our belief in clear language, in theological subtlety or scientific precision. And it is a way of living that makes thisconsciousness of God's presence the shaping context, the compelling energy of our lives. "To the questing soul no mere message from God suffices. She cries out for God himself."
Nevertheless it is hard to describe our own spiritual yearnings, our divine dreaming, our stuttering prayers as mystical, because we are so ordinary. It is far more embarrassing than we care to admit. Even if we are unaware of the centuries-long debate about mysticism (whether, that is, it is a rare calling or one that is a grace extended to every believer), we find ourselves presuming and living as though the call to life in the presence of God is not for such as we. Not everyone will understand. For while it has become OK to speak in vague spiritual generalities, even of angels and miracles, in the most unbelieving of situations, it is still considered eccentric, strange and even embarrassing to admit to our hunger for God, even our tentative interest. We are afraid, perhaps, that what we feel deep in the silence of our souls, is too fragile for the light of day, too personal for public exposure. We are tongue-tied, even at times ashamed.
And it is not just that we shy from public confession: it is that we hardly dare speak the word in the silence of our own souls. If it is true, as all the mystics have said, that ultimately we find God within, what makes us think that God would be at home within us? Others, perhaps. In us? Hardly!
But the hunger of our soul settles the debate, gives lie to our fears and our hesitancies. We want contact with God. If it is within that we shall find him, and if this be mysticism, so be it.
WE MUST ALSO ADMIT that we are often embarrassed and fearful of the company in which we could find ourselves. Men and women kill with the announcement that they have heard God's voice and are being obedient to his commands. The history of every people seems blood-soaked in the intolerance of believers, in their hatred for those who differ, in their discrimination against those who do not believe or behave as they do. See today's paper, whatever day this is. God forbid that we should be associated with these.
Still another fear holds us back — the fear, after a lifetime of seeking recognition as an achiever, of being thought a loser in a world that treasures only its winners, fear of being looked down upon as someone who having lost the battle with this world retreats whimpering into the next.
But we know that it is God we want, that we want so hungrily, but seek so timidly. Not the God of the headlines that shrinks our soul, not the God that paralyzes us in fear, nor the God who is called upon to justify hatred and cruelty. We seek, rather, the God of the mystics who alone can make of us all that we are meant to be. We seek the God who can expand our soul to the point of bursting, the God whose gift of freedom shatters our every expectation, the God who is love writ so large that we will never exhaust its promises.
The God we seek is not the first cause, the last temptation, the chilly abstraction of the best our minds can do, but the subject and object of a passion that overwhelms us even as it releases the very heart of our fallible and finite humanity.
This does not mean that we are seeking to be a monk, a theologian, an evangelist or even a church goer. We are not seeking as one author puts it, "religiosity lived for its own sake."
But we are seeking to overthrow many of the values by which we have measured our humanity and sought our fulfillment, and that in the end have left us empty and hungry for something more. We are seeking to replace Success as the standard of our lives with a spirit-centered life in which what we cannot see will replace in importance what we have always seen and relied on. It's a reversal that requires us to turn our life upside down, inside out.
Scary? Yes. Feeding our spiritual hunger demands more of us than a warm, effortless embrace of serenity. This is no journey for the timid but a way marked, if we are wise, by a profound fear of what meeting God might be like. It is, says scripture, a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The great work of Jewish mysticism, the Kaballah, has been traditionally forbidden to any but the most stable, the most mature, those who have the benefit of age. Why? Because the pursuit of God is a dangerous passage through treacherous waters that at every turn threaten to drown all but the most seasoned spiritual travelers. God does invite us on the journey is the message, but it is for spiritual risk-takers.
But an impossible journey? No. We are not the first to travel this path, we are not without guidance and we are not alone.
THE MYSTICAL QUEST FOR GOD takes us along well-traveled paths, blazed over the centuries by men and women of every religious and spiritual tradition who have accepted nothing less than dwelling consciously in the presence of God as the heart of their lives, the object of their human journey — and ours.
Hundreds of them have left records of their day-to-day experience along the way, recording what they learned so as to make our journey if not easier, at least less treacherous. Their lives and words are there to be drawn on at every point in our quest for God. "This," they say, each in their own way, "is what it is like to meet God. These are the blessings.
These are the terrors."
The lives and words of these men and women give us reason to hope, and perhaps even more importantly permission to hope.
It is a hope with roots in the visions of Ezekiel, nearly 600 years before the Christian era. It includes desert hermits of the 15th century and social activists of the 20th century. Some of them like Francis of Assisi are household names, others like Evagrius Ponticus are barely known even to scholars of the spiritual life. In the West it includes Jews and Moslems and Christians whose amazing unanimity demonstrates that the pursuit of a spiritual life is not confined to one place or time, to one lifestyle, to a single race, nationality, gender, temperament or religious tradition. Some, like Ezekiel and Paul have left their stories in scripture. Others like Augustine and Rumi have created classic works of literature. The words of others would have been lost to us had they not been recorded by followers. Some are anonymous, gathered by followers into works such as the Kabbalah. "The spirit breathes where it will."
Even in us.
In these pages we will find mystics of the Jewish scriptures cheek by jowl with 20th-century Christians, and a Sufi poet by the side of an eastern Christian, a gathering that reminds us that not only is there nothing new in the tradition, but that its very consistency is a source of strength and reassurance.
The same range of great spiritual experiences and themes dominate all their lives and traditions. Foremost is the practice of the presence of God. It is a theme that stresses the accessibility of God, the ongoing concern, the extraordinary sense of familiarity that some traditions would find offensive but which is the very air that Western mystics breathe. This same tradition, in the very same instance, stresses that the God with whom we share the air is finally a total mystery, beyond our knowing, who escapes our every attempt to confine and define God's being. This God is found as often, if not more often, in darkness than in light, in that frightening world where all our words and worlds end.
Paradox is in fact a hallmark of western spirituality, an ongoing reminder that mystery is the heart, the atmosphere and completion of our spiritual quest, that the ultimately untouchable is forever at our finger tips.
The world is where we experience God but the world in the end is never enough, a friend at any given moment, our seducer at the next. Solitude and silence may be the meat and potatoes of our prayer life but they are empty of nourishment when separated from service of our brothers and sisters. And so it goes, running through their lives and words, tantalizing, enveloping mystery and present, insistent actuality.
We need also to remember that one of the most profound themes of Western spirituality is that the God we pursue is himself our pursuer, that what keeps us apart is not God's distance but our flight, that we need, perhaps more than anything else, to stop running and let ourselves be caught.
For if there is a human hunger for God, it is matched by God's hunger for union with us, a hunger that extends not just to a few spiritually talented souls but to all of us, not just to the best of us but to the least of us.
We need, therefore, to be bold. Nothing is a greater obstacle to a spiritual life than a false modesty, the notion that we are too unimportant to be a subject of God's greatest gifts, the object of his unwavering desire. Believe Teresa of Avila when she says: "We do not have to be bashful with God."
We are invited to join the company of God seekers. Our attention is requested by the Hound of Heaven.
It is time to stop running.
©1999 by SORIN BOOKS
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