My Soul Thirsts for God

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
    so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
    for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
    the face of God?

(Psalm 42: 1-2, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

God, or God’s angelic messengers, used to appear before people—not all the time, exactly, but often enough that many of them could, after the initial shock, process and accept the experience readily enough. Biblical scholar James L. Kugel charmingly describes the reactions of Abraham, Moses, and other figures from the Hebrew Bible to their divine encounters as “surprised, but not flabbergasted.” They may not have expected to hear from God, they may not have wanted to heed God’s message, but when the time came, they listened.

In The Great Shift, Kugel looks at how the authors of the Hebrew Bible understood and depicted such encounters—how, over the course of centuries, God became an increasingly distant figure. For Kugel, this has a lot to do with human consciousness; as we developed a distinct sense of self, he theorizes, we began to cut ourselves off from the rest of creation. We began to feel the absence of Spirit more than its presence.

(I shouldn’t say “we,” actually. I’m describing a very modern, specifically Western notion of identity and consciousness, “a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz described it.)

And yet, as the 42nd Psalm makes clear, our souls still thirsted—and still thirst today—to feel the presence of the divine.

That longing brings Quakers together at every meeting for worship. Much as pentecostal Christians hope to be filled by the Holy Spirit, or participants in a Vodou ceremony anticipate becoming possessed by one of their gods, Friends hope this meeting will confirm George Fox’s declaration that anyone of us can still hear directly from God, that “Christ has come to teach His people Himself,” a true spiritual connection achieved without priests or sacraments. If it doesn’t happen for them personally, they might still hear a divine message passed along through another Friend.

We could each wait on our own for that encounter with Spirit to occur, but we choose to assemble in community with others like ourselves, all intent on the same broad goal (though we may approach it with different perspectives). Together, we reinforce one another’s faith—because believing not only that God exists, but that we might directly experience God in our lifetimes, takes work.

In How God Becomes Real, T.M. Luhrmann writes from a psychological and anthropological perspective about the challenges religious people face in overcoming their fears—particularly fears based in real-world conditions like disaster or poverty or domestic violence—and accepting “the love of a god [that] may seem frankly implausible.”

Luhrmann doesn’t take a stand on whether “gods and spirits” really exist, but she acknowledges that we cannot know them the same way we can know an apple sitting on our kitchen counter, or the kitchen counter itself, or the loved one who took the apple out of the fruit drawer in the refrigerator and put it on the counter for us. Instead, we have to imagine the presence of gods and spirits in order for them to “feel alive” to us—and we need to have people around us who won’t dismiss what we imagine as silly fantasies or delusions. 

Because many people today have stopped taking encounters with Spirit seriously.

Think about how uncomfortable even people in religious communities can get when someone starts talking about a spiritual experience, especially if that conversation takes place outside of a religious space. (In one of my favorite sections of How God Becomes Real, Luhrmann recounts conversations with charismatic Christians in the United States who recognize exactly how crazy they might sound to others, while charismatics in non-Western societies have no such anxieties.)

I’m not saying we should abandon skepticism when considering spiritual experiences, even our own. I’ve had at least three… uncanny moments in my own life, and I’ve come up with solid, rational, materialist explanations for each of them—including the one that led me back to the Religious Society of Friends after more than a decade away. I still take that one quite seriously, even if I tend to accept the others as weird but random events.

And yet, even though I feel I encountered something greater than myself, greater than this world, in that moment, years later I’m still working out the exact contours of what I believe when it comes to God (or Spirit, if you prefer). Happily, in the “unprogrammed” tradition in which I’ve landed, Quakers don’t bother themselves with policing the exact contours of other people’s beliefs. They see that your soul thirsts for God, as theirs does, and they invite you to seek succor in the company of like-minded friends.