Spiritual Hiccups - Longing

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
   so my soul longs for you, O God.    
My soul thirsts for God,
   for the living God. 

I'm reading an interesting book called The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality.  The author speaks of all people having a spirituality, though he does not mean what some people mean by that term.  He says our spirituality is what we do with and how we channel the fire inside us.  All of us are driven by some sort of passion, desire, restlessness or fire.  Our spirituality is how we understand, channel, tap into, squelch, or navigate this energy.

Fire and energy were not much a part of my early faith experience.  "Decently and in order" is a favorite Presbyterian axiom, and the church I knew growing up was big on order, logic, and rationality, with little evidence of passion or fire.  And I suspect that this sort of experience has something to do with the many folk who profess to be "spiritual but not religious."  They presume (incorrectly, I believe) that religion is stifling to the passion they associate spirituality.

Certainly there are many examples of faith communities that do seem stifling to passion and fire.  Yet when I think of the many people who have died for the faith over the centuries, surely they were animated by remarkable passion that enabled such sacrifice. 

I wonder sometimes about the passions and fires that animate our society these days.  They are many and varied.  People have all sorts of causes and passions: the environment, ending poverty, stopping abortion, political ideologies, personal pleasure, making money, looking out for number one, patriotic fervor, and so on.  And I suspect that some of the partisan division in our day comes from the deficient spiritualities channeling such passions. Sometimes these passions sweep us up and lead us to foolish excesses that damage community and ignore civility.  But many of us have gone the other way and buried our passions so deep inside ourselves that we are more prone to depression than excess.  And we contribute to our society's dysfunction by our numbness, by defecting in place.

We Mainline Christians, who have sometimes shunted fire and passion aside in our religious communities, would do well to acknowledge our need for passion and longing, to recognize that any true Christian spirituality has to do with the powerful, dangerous, yet life giving power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot simply do things decently and in order.  We must also be on fire for God.  We must thirst for the living God.

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