Monday, March 24
Today’s responsorial psalm, which splices together Psalms 42 and 43, is anchored in a seismic chorus: “Athirst is my soul for the living God./When shall I go and behold the face of God?”
The psalmist here voices the deeply felt need at the heart of our existence. Thirst is physical; it resides deep in the body, throbbing in the roof of the mouth and the arch of shoulders and the pit of the stomach and the muscles of the legs. Thirst is psychic; the mind reaches out for succor, lurches toward anything that might give it relief. Thirst, in fact, amplifies our taste; water is never colder or richer or more vivid than when it hits a parched tongue.
So what is it for the soul to thirst for God? It is a cry. “I pain for you, O God, in all my being! I strain out toward you! I yearn to savor you!” The psalmist is crying out for nothing less than the “face of God,” that true sight of divinity in all its richness; to behold it is to feel God with the crystalline sharpness of water on a thirsty palate. But if the psalmist’s desire is vivid, it’s also tragically unfulfilled. When, the psalmist wonders, do we get to quench our thirst? When will we get to savor the divine life, amidst this world’s dryness?
It’s meaningful that, in this psalm, the Holy Spirit finds us through thirst, that most felt sensation, and through poetry, that most felt kind of writing. Our pains and our grace alike, it appears here, lies in the depths of our living experience. As the theologian Edward Schillebeeckx writes, this world is “the reality of God which we are permitted to enter,” and though we cannot grasp it in its fullness, we encounter it “in human perception, and not behind, above, or beneath it.” It’s precisely inhabiting the world that we take ourselves “in the direction of the spiritual meaning of reality.” Distant though divine life may feel from the world of our minor feelings—the thrashing needs of our mortal bodies, the hummingbird flit of our psyches—it is precisely in these feelings that we brush our hand against God’s loving face. Or perhaps vice versa.
The artist is given this gift—aesthetics, whose Greek root means perception, feeling. Art enters into our experience and proposes to open new worlds of meaning to our perception; a great painting or song awakens us not just to new sensations but also to new ways of living, a way of savoring the world like that taste of water after a long thirst. To create is to awaken ourselves to the grace of our perceptions and the divine whisper in them—to help us bathe in what Victorian art critic Walter Pater calls reality’s “hard, gemlike flame.” The psalmist, then, gives voice to the deep thirst of our being. But thirst is, too, a way of finding the face of God.
Ryan Carroll is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book reviews, essays, audio retreats, and reflections have been published by Public Books, National Catholic Reporter, and the Jesuit Media Lab.
You can learn more about him here.