As I indicated in a post last week, I have this whole list of things I am struggling with spiritually right now, and the second item on the list says SATISFACTION/SPIRITUALITY. I don’t know if I have as much to say about this one as I do about the last, even though in many ways it is bigger. And again, it’s more of a cluster of interrelated issues (that are themselves related to other things on the list) than one discrete one. And it’s a hard one to talk about because it’s vague, abstract, and super personal.
One of the facets of this problem is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that I hunger for God. I desperately want to know God and be known by God, to experience God’s presence and have that hunger somehow be satisfied in God.
The problem is that God never satisfies, and I don’t know what to do about that.
I can sometimes get little tastes of God’s presence and momentary mild satisfaction in God, but never in the deep, complete sense that I desperately long for. And I only get any of that when I engage in some kind of dedicated spiritual practice. God never calls me; I always have to call God. And even when I call God, never fully satisfies.
Really, it would be easy to just not care about God. That’s what a lot of people do. They’re not worried about it, it doesn’t interest them, so God presence or distance is just irrelevant. God is not a thing they have in their life and they don’t miss God or sense a lack. That would work great for me, except I sense the lack. I have this hunger, and it wants to be satisfied. I want God. I can’t just, not. So here I am.
I have yet to find an approach to spirituality, prayer, spiritual practice, rule of life, or “relationship with Jesus Christ” that leads reliably to any kind of satisfaction in God. Granted, I have never been able to do any of that stuff very reliably or consistently, but that’s one of the relevant variables, isn’t it? A pathway that leads to God that I am unable to walk may as well be a pathway that doesn’t lead to God at all.
This drifts into a second facet, which is that I consistently find that, the darker things are for me (whether it’s a matter of depression, anxiety, or just terrible shit happening), the less I am able to pursue God through spiritual practice. Really, it’s more extreme than that: I am only able to bring myself to pursue God through sustained spiritual practice, but I am only able to engage in sustained spiritual practice when I am in a good place, things are going well, and I am generally emotionally and spiritually healthy. When things are dark, I can’t. And that means that when I need God the most, God is the least there for me.
I mean, on the one hand, I could just totally blame myself. I’m not doing a good enough job of connecting with God, so how should I expect God to be there for me? But I need God to have enough grace for me to be there when I’m unable to reach out for him. I need God to call me when I’m unable to call him. If my relationship with God is solely dependent on my ability to consistently maintain it, then I’m basically screwed. Also, if that’s the case, then God is an asshole, because that’s not how healthy relationships work.
Many very lovely people have recommended all kinds of approaches and spiritual practices to me as ways to connect to God, but most of them are non-starters. I have had some success (during good times) praying the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer, but, like I said, that only holds for as long as things are going well. When I really need God, God is never there. But the hunger stays.
Someone smart told me that the hunger itself is actually a connection to God. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t solve the problem of never feeling satisfied.
Finally, I wonder if I am onto something with last week’s revelation about Mormonism, i.e., that one of the biggest obstacles I have to knowing God deeply (and experiencing God’s presence) is knowing God with all of my pieces, and that means collecting them and honoring and acknowledging all of them. Even–especially–the Mormon ones. But I don’t know what that looks like. My gut says that the way to connect to God is through depth–engaging deeply in a set of spiritual practices over time, but that also involves choosing a framework to engage with, to the exclusion of others, and I don’t know if that works. So it’s a frustrating paradox. Setting aside the fact that God pretty much utterly abandons me every time I even have a dim twilight of the soul, my intuition says that I could theoretically commune with God in, for example, an Anglican way (the daily office, like I’ve been trying to do), but it turns out that doesn’t work because I’m not an Anglican person. Or at least not just an Anglican person. I’m also, deep in my heart center, a Mormon person. So, somehow I need to figure out how to reach out to God in a way that honors all of my messy pieces, I guess. But I don’t have any idea what that even looks like in practice.
And I know there are some of you out there reading this and thinking “oh man, you’re seriously over-complicating this; it’s really so easy to just (fill in the blank with something trite or vague.” Well, fuck you, you smug asshole. I’m doing the best that I can with the tools I have. I’ve already tried simple and it doesn’t work.
Sailing to Byzantium 
All I have to go on is my experience, but this is what it’s been like for me…
A couple of years ago now I started facing some trauma that lived deep deep down in my my very center. Before that point, I had not been able to sustain a spiritual practice because I felt very skeptical of such things. My experiences in Mormonism made me feel as if spiritual practice was a manipulation to keep people from asking the right questions, so I was vary wary of them. At one point I felt compelled to say to God, “I don’t know what this is or what you want.”
As I have reflected on that, I began to recognize that the need to tell God I had no idea what God wanted of me was God; the experience of being driven into the darkness was God; the act of naming what was true, not what was expected, was God. God met me, ultimately, in the existential agony. I don’t mean that God RESOLVED the existential agony, or that God was somehow outside the existential agony and came alongside me when I was struggling with it. I mean that God was present in the agony itself. There was not, and still isn’t, a point at which I felt fully satisfied. I don’t know if that will ever come. There may be moments we feel uplifted, but they come and go; I am finding that a deep and mature spiritual life is full of darkness as much as light if the cross has anything to say.
The most helpful thing I have learned is to sit and listen to what is going on inside me. Even if what is going on inside me is chaos, it usually has something to teach me, and I have discovered that God is often swirling around in the chaos in some pretty unexpected ways.
In other words, it seems to me that you are on the right track, even as it feels as if you have no idea what the track even looks like.
Hi! This is Kay, from so many blogs I can’t even name them all. 😂
It’s been 10 years since I’ve blogged. Heck I’m not even sure if you remember me. Do you remember the crowd at handbasket? Or the river lethe? Or ephemeral thoughts? All me.
I actually wandered onto your blog a couple years ago and saw that you were pursuing a conservative Christian path. I didn’t feel like I had anything to add to any of the conversations you were having here so I read and moved on.
This evening I was going through some of the way back machine is archives and one of my old blogs is archived and you are on my archived blog roll. So I clicked it and here I am.
This comment has been pretty off topic. Sorry. I will wrap up my rambling by saying that my religious searching has taken me topsy-turvy again, from quasi Christian back to quasi pagan. Maybe with a touch of Christian esoteric belief.
I’ve been thinking about blogging again. If I do and I get it set up, I will connect with you again that way.
So good to see you’re still here.
Kay – from Utah
Sorry for those typos. Wish I could edit.
Kay, good to see you again! Of course I remember you.
I deal with episodes of depression or bouts of anxiety, and I also struggle with wanting to feel God, and trying to maintain a daily routine to do so. For me, it helps in movement…doing things, taking action towards the very things that support what I value. I feel God wants us to find ways to experience life and it doesn’t really matter what we do, it’s how we do it. Like our intent. Let’s not worry too much about expectations…just do something that brings us closer to the things we value. God, in a sense, is everywhere and pleased as we use our free will to experience this life.
In regards to a daily connection with God…I honestly don’t think it matters if you pray or meditate or go for a walk, help others, or make a gratitude list… change it up daily, I hate to say this, but God doesn’t care what it is, it’s the intent behind it and most importantly I think God wouldn’t want you to feel this way. So own your shit and be proud of all your pieces…God is. -peace sent your way