The triumphalist having-it-all kind of spirituality is a surprisingly impoverished version of Christian discipleship. Whenever Christians claim too much in their experience, immediacy of fellowship with God, certainty and assurance of every blessed blessing, authority in their knowing and claimed intimacy in their praying, they are in danger of losing one of the most important parts of any deep, enduring and transformative relationship. I mean the gift of mystery, necessary limitation of vision and understanding, God's wise frustration of our desire to know and know and know, and an essential discipline and restraint in the desire to possess.
Longing for God is by definition a feeling of incompleteness, a confession from the heart of our need, dependency and willingness to surrender. But if we always receive what we long for, always find what we seek, have every desire fulfilled, then what is left? In those deepest relations of love there is, and must always be, a surplus beyond our reach,discoveries awaiting that may never be made, mysteries in the heart and life of the other that are forvever beyond us. So I am content to know that I will never know, not fully, not completely. God is not to be comprehended so easily, the Gospel of grace and love is not reducible to our ideas, statements and controlling articulations and concepts. God is, well, God.
Which is why I love the humility and content with discontent that marks this beautiful poem prayer of Ambrose. The aspiration to seek and find is gthere all right, but so is the recognition that unless God accommodates the reality of who God is to the limits of our understanding we don;t even know where to start to look.
O God
Teach me to see you,
and reveal yourself to me when I seek you,
For I cannot seek you unless you first teach me,
nor find you unless you first reveal yourself to me.
Let me seek you in longing, and long for you in seeking.
Let me find you in love, and love you in finding.
(Ambrose of Milan, 339-397 )
The photo is of an autumn moon, partially clouded, visible but obscured, luminous but distant, a reminder because we need it, that the dark side of the moon is hidden. One of the deficits of a triumphalist spirituality is a lack of awareness of what Heschel called the ineffable otherness of God. It is that ineffability, that otherness, that frustrates our longing, and saves us from the sin of presumption, and enables us to be Blessed as those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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