I have spent my entire life pursuing this desire for more than what is.
Thomas Moore The Soul’s Religion
I have grown up searching for a cure. At some point, exhausted by the journey I began to crumble under the weight of the conscious and unconscious burden. In the state of utter neediness, grace began to reveal its face. Care more than cure was its language. Much like Thomas Moore, who had gone through his own trek through organized religion (in this case Catholicism), I had discovered an unending yearning for more. I was not sure of the essence of that sense of lack or its name but its presence was forever with me. It was clear, as it was with Moore, that I had been taught a spirituality of escape, a theology of detachment.
I had spent a large portion of my adulthood lost in the minutia of the details of spirituality never seeing much of the whole; only the parts and those parts were strewn over all my life. Unknowingly, I had mistakenly seen my spiritual life as a public display of how well I was doing, how much I had learned, how wise I had become, how much I know about God and could articulate it at a drop of a hat. That means schooling, positions of leadership, and a deep inner drive to accomplish this status of a godly person. My spiritual journey had become more of an ambition, an inner need to strive for observable out department and witnessed clarity of soul.
This is not to say my journey was void of spiritual insight or visitations of the Spirit. In fact, although an inner compulsivity tended to erode any deep sense of peace, grace is just that and there were clear signs of God’s undying patience and wiliness to pursue my foolishness with love. In fact, at some point the spiritual odyssey became filled with a palpable sense of the Father’s relentless kindness.
I have spent nearly an entire lifetime regarding desire as an enemy. Due in part to the weariness of soul that comes with age, I am starting to allow myself to be overwhelmed by the voice of desire but not in the way the Church has taught me to avoid the “desires of the flesh.” I now am beginning to see the reconciling power of desire as its shear relentlessness beckons other parts of my soul to the front in a manner I may not have been open to or even listened to in the past. Now beholding and desire are seen as mates and co-conspirators. Along side of desire and beholding is the amazing power of pondering and enchantment. When desire is uncoupled from these other compatriots it becomes ill focused, obsessed, and burns without clarity and calling.
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