Imagine for a moment, if you can, that you are terribly parched and thirsty, but for some reason you don't know exactly what that means. You know something is wrong. You know your body is craving something, but you simply don't know what it is. I'm not sure how this situation could actually happen. Perhaps someone with dementia might forget that drinking fluids cured this craving. Perhaps someone with some sort of amnesia or who has suffered a stroke might experience a terrifying need that they did not know how to meet.
"Let anyone who is thirsty come to me," Jesus says, and he speaks of "living water," which in Jesus' days literally meant fresh, running water, as from a stream. But the narrator of John's gospel goes on to say that Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit.
It is not unusual for people to speak of "spiritual dryness." But even those who have such a vocabulary often seem to struggle finding what they need to take away their thirst. And I suspect that even more people know there is something wrong, but have no idea how to fix it. And so they experiment and try all sorts of options. Some options are better than others, even if they don't fully quench the thirst. Other options can be terribly destructive. Alcohol and drug dependence, abusive relationships, pursuing money and power at all costs; all these strike me as attempts to fill a need that, in the end, only make matters worse.
When I feel something is missing in my life, I often have inclinations about what would help. In retrospect, a lot of these inclinations turn out to be less than helpful. What I've heard, learned, picked up from the culture, and so on, doesn't always end up being the best guide. And if the Pharisees in today's gospel reading are any guide, religious experts and leaders are not always good guides either.
I hear a lot of people who say they are "spiritual but not religious." Technically speaking I'm not sure this is truly possible, but I think I understand what they mean. They somehow figured out that the craving they feel is a spiritual one, but when they've tried church, it didn't seem to help. And perhaps this is because we churchy types sometimes get so preoccupied with doing church that we forget where our living water comes from, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me!
No comments:
Post a Comment