Longing for God part 2: God's longing for us

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The Longing for God, part 2: God’s longing for us

As I write this I assume that you are reading it because you have found within yourself a longing that cannot be satisfied by the things of this world, a longing which calls to you and gently, as the Lord says through the prophet Hosea:

I led them with cords of human kindness

with bands of love. (11:4)

We left off with this idea yesterday: “If you do this [spend time before God], you will discover that it was He who was seeking you all along.” And that is what I would like to take up today through the study of various texts from the Christian and other traditions.

This love of God which we experience within us

is not a product of our own imagination or creativity,

but is rather a reaction to what God has done in us:

1 John 4:19 “We love because God first loved us.”

And so, the longing itself establishes a connection between us:

Longing is a direct connection from the heart of the seeker to the heart of the Beloved.

(Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Sufism: the Transformation of the Heart, p. 13)

Note: Sufism is a movement within Islam that is particularly interested in the mystical journey of man (“the seeker”) to God (“the Beloved.)

So anyway, God put this longing into our own hearts and beckons to us through it to a more profound way of living:

The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 1: “In that most gracious way of his, he kindled your desire for himself, and bound you to him by the chain of such longing, and thus led you to that more Special life, a servant among his own special servants. He did this that you might learn to be more especially his and to live more spiritually than ever you could have done in the common state of life.”

Again, like grace, it is God’s doing. Consider what the Sufi poet Rumi has written:

“Not a single lover would seek union if the Beloved were not seeking it.”

Or perhaps this poem of his will inspire you:

                The thirsty man is moaning, “O delicious water!”

                The water is calling, “Where is the one who will drink me?”

                The thirst in our souls is the magnetism of the Water:

                We are Its, and It is ours.   (quoted in Helminski, Kabir (2000): The Rumi Collection, p. 108)

The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs us that this call from the Beloved is at the heart of human existence, and we can never be happy until we recognize and heed this call:

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for. (¶ 27)

. . . to be continued . . .

God bless you!