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October 16, 2018
“In a vision . . . I beheld and comprehended the whole creation, that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else. . . . And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: ‘This world is pregnant with God!’” —Angela of Foligno, Book of Visions and Instructions (thirteenth century)
“His desire gives rise to yours.” —Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 57 on the Song of Songs (twelfth century)
“There are pleasures that are able to save people.” —The Shepherd of Hermas, III.vi.5 (second century)
“God’s glory in creation appears in various degrees and ways. An insect and a star, the mildew on the wall and the cedar in Lebanon, a common labourer and a man like Augustine, are all creatures of God; yet how dissimilar they are and how varied their ways of glorifying God.” —Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit (1900)
“There cannot be such a thing as true life without praise. Praising and no longer praising are related to each other as are living and no longer living.” —Claus Westermann, The Praise of God in the Psalms (1965)
“Come, for you are yourself the desire within me. Come, for you are my breath and my life.” —Simeon, the New Theologian (tenth century)
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I don’t see the road ahead of me. . . . The fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire for all that I am doing. . . . And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.” —Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (1956)
“In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon. He could not recall where he had heard it, or from whom; it had been somewhere on the rivers of Brazil. . . . Yet the idea of the moths in the high darkness, straining upward, filled him with longing, and at these times he would know that he had not found what he was looking for.” —Peter Matthiessen,
In a landscape that pulses with desire, failure is often more common than fulfillment. Yearning is constant.
To learn desire one necessarily sits at the feet of those who are thirsty. The satisfied never make good teachers. It isn’t the mastery of truth, but a relentless longing for it that qualifies those who become trusted guides for others. Mark it down as a rule: the desert alone possesses the secret knowledge of water.
Absence sharpens attention to a fine edge. Oddly enough, the desert is the best place to study water. Its landscape is defined by the memory of rain, etched into the land at every turn.
A remembrance of flow lingers in the shadow of every rock. This is how the desert knows water—achingly, desperately, with a passion bordering on dread. It’s the only way we ever know God as well.
The Celts and Calvinists alike were fascinated with eternal mysteries, the wonders of creation, a rigorous discipline, and the harsh, stubborn realities of life.
Calvinism was, in part, the product of a landscape of desire—hardened by affliction, toughened by geography, yet driven by the earth’s wild beauty to a God of matchless splendor.
Calvinism is the natural theology of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills of Scotland and in the wilds of North America. The Calvinist feels himself surrounded by naught but hostile powers; his is a perpetual conflict from his very birth.
This is a half-truth at best. Kellner missed the deeper realization of the Reformed tradition that God dances in thunderstorm and shadow, luring the world to a breathtaking beauty through the power of unquenched thirst. Calvin knew that desire is the great teacher, and sustained desire the path to holiness.
After churning out the first page or two, I wasn’t able to write another word.
To my chagrin, I first had to live my way more fully into the truth I was trying to express, passing (with the terrain) through an experience of Puritan “desertion” before being able to write about it.
I’d brought with me a misplaced passion to produce—and I was miserable.
I hadn’t come primarily to celebrate our marriage, to delight in my wife and the wild beauty of the place, to meet God in its terrible and glorious silence. I was there to write, to weave words together with magic, to exercise control over the subject of Reformed desire.
Only as I submitted to what the landscape wanted to teach me about longing and the abandonment of desire could I give up my compulsion to write for the sake of the deeper desires before me—the gift of my wife, the surrounding wilderness, and a God of love who refused to be captured by words.
Reformed spirituality. Its path toward holiness involves an awakening of desire, the relinquishing of what initially may have seemed so important, a subsequent longing for God alone, and a discovery that what was sought had been there all along.
tradition can, at its best, be summarized in five vigorous convictions: 1. A response of awe before a grand and powerful God, seen in the majesty of sky and sea, and in the transformed lives of those whose stories are recounted in Scripture. 2. An amazement that this same God is full of grace and love, evoking a response of gratitude, even adoration. 3. A need to probe the intellectual mysteries of faith, while recognizing the metaphorical, accommodating, and limited nature of all theological language. 4. A concern to carry theological reflection to its completion in the transformation of
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The centrality of desire in this book is rooted in the awareness that a misplaced yearning lies at the heart of the current ecological crisis.
Desire is killing us, along with our planet.
The manufactured desires of a consumer culture turn creation into a cafeteria line of consumable resources.
The Reformed tradition offers in response, like Carmelite and Buddhist traditions before it, an ironic reminder that the only desire truly able to satisfy is a desire which cannot be filled.
Our deepest human longing is to linger with a mystery we aren’t able to fathom. We stand in awe before the extravagant wonder of an irreducible “other.”
Our greatest joy lies in what we can’t possess. This is true of all our relationships: from God to each other to the earth itself. Only in wonder do we ever encounter any of them. Every experience of beauty involves the joyous agony of a desire unattained.
Beauty as Eros in submission. Desire that cannot grasp or fully consume, but only encounter. The dynamic energy of the other who remains the other.
The Puritans, for example, were a people of fervent desire as well as rigorous discipline. It may surprise us how much they used the bold language of the Song of Songs to express their zealous passion. They spoke unashamedly of “lusting after God.” Yet the God of beauty they desired was always more than they could grasp. Hence, they wrote perpetually of their struggles with longings unfulfilled, a sense of God’s absence provoking an ever deeper yearning.
One experiences God in loss even more powerfully than in attainment. Joseph Symonds, in a book typical of Puritan spirituality, cautioned that “Desertions are not the interruption of God’s love, but of the acts of his love; his affection is the same, but the expression is varied.”6 He pointed to the “absences of God” as occasions for encountering a love more subtle and profound. Once they gain this insight, “the faithful usually find their worst days their best days. . . . The capacity of the soul is widened, and enlarged in affliction. . . . He that is most athirst, drinks most.”7
“Desire,” as Symonds defined it, is a wintry discipline, trusting in a faithfulness it cannot see. “Delight” is a summer activity, reveling in God’s gracious open-handedness. “By desire . . . love extends it self towards God as absent: by delight she enjoyes him as present: desire is love in motion, delight is love in rest.” In God’s strange habit of rewarding the dearest lovers of God with the subtlest signs of grace, therefore, “He keeps the cistern empty, that we may look to the Clouds above.”8
Mine is a tale of a boy raised in a fundamentalist, Calvinist tradition in the swamp-filled pinelands of central Florida, chafing under its harsh image of an angry God. Yet that’s where desire was first planted in him—a longing for something as alluringly beautiful as it was awesome and demanding. Growing up, he marveled at underwater snakes and white cranes in the lake behind his house, even as the lusty, heartfelt singing of “Amazing Grace” stirred him in Sunday night services.
Barth, despite his gloriously theocentric theology, didn’t prove entirely satisfying either. The Swiss Reformed theologian’s God was so “Wholly Other,” it was hard to imagine such a deity delighting in water moccasins and great blue herons.10
Swamp water continued to flow in his veins, as he sought on Ozark trails what he had once found in marshlands of cypress and palmettos. He thought at times of converting to Mother Church, but something still drew him to his roots in the Calvinist tradition.
Reformed spirituality necessarily begins with a stunning vision of God’s grandeur.
Yet they held the doctrine of human depravity in high esteem. I remember stories told of a traveling evangelist whose object lesson for children scared the hell out of everyone. He pulled a rotten egg from under the pulpit, telling the children gathered around him that he had left it out of his refrigerator for two weeks and that it represented each of them as rotten sinners. It smelled something awful. He then reached under the pulpit for a hammer which, he said, represented God’s holiness and almighty power.
I cringe now in thinking of it, but at the time a love of wilderness, a readiness to take life, and a God of awesome power were inextricably intertwined in my inchoate Calvinist imagination. My need, ever since, has been to know how to retain a God of feral and untamed beauty while affirming a moral universe where all of life is sacred.
I fell in love with a God I’d first learned to fear. In the Reformed tradition, knowing oneself to be chosen (and loved) by a God of infinite power means having nothing else to fear. Being chosen, adopted out of abject poverty as a son or daughter of the King, gives one an extraordinary sense of self, a freedom to move through the world with fearless abandon. In my upbringing, Calvinist images of royalty were oddly juxtaposed with notions of undeserving insignificance.14 To be chosen and loved was everything.
I knew myself for the first time as unaccountably loved. Not by a mother whose nervous breakdowns mirrored a history of abuse. Nor by a father whose suicide would provide his only escape from torment. But by a God of glory who encompassed wildness and loss, yet loved indiscriminately. It was the same God I had met in stunning Florida sunsets and the crashing surf of the Atlantic coast.
I knew myself chosen and loved by a God who roared through the pages of the King James Bible, danced in passing hurricanes, and sang in the blue eyes of the girl with light brown hair in the church youth group (the woman I later married). Such a God was never “safe,” but always good, as Lucy learned from Mr. Beaver in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.15 This was a God of wild beauty, very different from the God of savage predictability I occasionally encountered at church.
My spiritual journey, ever since, has been an effort to recover God’s wild and winsome splendor, making demands on my life, rollicking in fresh falling rain, fiercely affirming the whole of creation as unaccountably good, and stirring desire at every turn. Yearning for such a God requires a willingness to abandon previous conceptions of a rigid deity, a willingness to be surprised by grace. As I discovered when I began to write this book, a letting go (a release of control) is, at some point, what every true longing entails. God is always more than we wish for and certainly more than we can
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Authentic desire for God must pass through the same fire that purged Isaiah’s lips, bringing reckless action to a halt and closing one’s mouth in awe before a God of beauty and power who declares all things loved. It means challenging every shadow tendency toward self-delusion, exclusivism, and violence. Only as the soul is empty enough can true desire safely fill it.
Giving praise to God comes as naturally to the Reformed believer as to the Jesuit scholastic writing the letters “A.M.D.G.” at the top of his daily journal. Ad Majorum Dei Gloriam, Ignatius Loyola urged his brothers: Do everything to the greater glory of God.
Nature’s untamed beauty awakens in my own Reformed heart an atavistic need to praise, to shout back glory.
In squall lines racing down from the Swiss alps, the Genevan pastor heard God saying, “I must come to you in a dreadful manner and admonish you in a way that will make you feel, in spite of your murmuring, that you cannot escape the incomprehensible majesty in me.”
An amazing insight of Celtic and Reformed spirituality is that even the wind completes itself in praise. “The world was founded for this purpose,” said Calvin, “that it should be the sphere of the divine glory.”3
John Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva, English and American Puritans in the seventeenth century, and Jonathan Edwards in eighteenth-century Massachusetts all conceived of the world as a theater of God’s glory. They commonly spoke of nature as a school of desire, an important means by which humans are trained in awe and longing for God.
Nature as a school of desire for God
Learning to delight in God may seem a strange foundation on which to build an ecological ethic, but the Reformed tradition (when true to itself) sees God’s glory as a perfectly natural basis for valuing everything God has brought into being.
Back in the early 1960s, well before the first Earth Day celebration and even before the Club of Rome report on the threat of human growth to the natural environment, Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler issued one of the first theological calls for ecological awareness. He urged that environmental ethics take their cue from the opening question of the Westminster Catechism in the Calvinist tradition. What is the chief end of man and woman (and of all creation, for that matter)? The answer: to glorify God and enjoy God forever.5
