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Books As my body grows older, my spirit becomes
younger
By JOHN J. McNEILL
I am now 73 years old. I have discovered that every decade of my
life has been happier and more peaceful than the last. Each decade has brought
with it greater intimacy with a God of mercy and love and a greater trust in
Gods love for me. As my body grows older, my spirit becomes younger. I
know this is a gift from God for which I am grateful. As the years have gone
by, my prayer life has undergone a radical change, from a prayer of the head, a
prayer of words, concepts and thought processes, to a prayer of the heart. God
has given me the grace to be continuously aware of a longing in my heart for a
greater intimacy with God. My awareness of God is based on what I am deprived
of, what I need and dont have, what I am yearning for, what I have a
hunger and thirst for and have not yet achieved.
Privation is a paradoxical concept. Philosophers define
privation as the absence of that which ought to be.
Privation, then, is an experience of absence in presence or presence in
absence. To experience God as privation, then, necessarily means that I have
already had an experience of Gods presence. I like to compare it to a
missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. If I see it, I will know it because there is
only one piece that will fit into that empty space. In St. Augustines
words, You made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will never rest
until they rest in You.
My personal knowledge of God has little to do with any
intellectual definition. All the great mystics saw our efforts to capture God
with thoughts and concepts as self-defeating. They recommended in prayer that
we should empty our minds of thoughts and concepts and enter the cloud of
unknowing.
My knowledge of God, then, comes from the hunger and thirst in
myself. In the words of Psalm 63:1:
O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for
you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there
is no water.
My prayer life consists of being in touch with that hunger and
thirst, not letting anything fill it in or block it off, or hide it from me.
Rather, I strive to be in touch with that hunger and thirst, to consecrate it
by converting it intentionally into prayer and identifying with it. My prayer
life, then, is very simple. I spend a lot of time just being in touch with that
longing, being open to it, and waiting. I continually ask God to come and meet
that deep deprivation within me. I am like a desert waiting for the rain to
come and soak in. As a result, my prayer is continuous.
I set aside time to enter into myself, empty out all thoughts and
rest in the presence of God and experience the longing for that presence. I
also spend some time every day praying the New York Times,
formulating a prayer appropriate to every headline and article. In this way, I
strive to let my prayer reach out to the whole world.
At a recent Easter vigil, the liturgy at sundown on the Saturday
before Easter Sunday, I heard this passage from the Psalms: As a deer
longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God (42:1).
Suddenly, I was in touch with a profound longing for union with God, a longing
that was at the same time painful and pleasurable, and I began to cry. I am
grateful to God for that moment and see it as a great grace. Since that time, I
am consciously aware that what I want is intimacy with God, and I will not
settle for anything less. I am aware that being in touch with that longing is
already a kind of awareness of God through privation. This awareness is
Gods gift and promise. All other touches of intimacy in my life --
intimacies of family, friendships and my intimacy with my lover, Charlie -- are
foretastes of that ultimate intimacy. But the only intimacy that can meet my
needs and fill my heart is the intimacy with God. I particularly love the words
of St. Augustines prayer in his Confessions.
Late have I loved you, O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new; late have
I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I
searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you
created.
You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me
from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.
You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You
flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance
on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger
and thirst for more. You touched me, and now I long for your peace.
The great spiritual leaders of the past have always taught that
God in fact nurtured our growth in capacity and potential for a passionate
intimate relationship with God. My own experience of spiritual development
finds its closest description in the understanding of spiritual growth in the
writings of Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory describes beautifully the step-by-step
nature of spiritual growth. He says that God always waits on our freedom. Our
first serious yes! to God enables divine love to begin to act within us.
Our inner space -- as a result of that yes! -- is then ready to receive
something of God. God fills that space as fully as we are able to accept. At
the same time, this filling enlarges the space, and we long for more. Thus, the
lover of God is always filled to his or her capacity and always longs for more
of God. Yet the longing does not bring frustration because there is a fullness.
According to St. Gregory, this process goes on beyond death into eternity
because God is infinite and we are always a finite capacity open to further
growth in our identity with an infinite God. For all eternity, we continue to
grow deeper and deeper in union with a God who is infinite and, therefore, can
never be exhausted.
The most difficult spiritual struggle for me is the endeavor to
center myself in God and the love of God versus the ravenous hunger in my ego
to make itself the center of my universe. I am aware of a very real danger:
that if God gives me even a taste of the joy of Gods presence and love,
my ego could go completely out of control. I am likely to start searching to
experience Gods love as an ego fix, trying to use God as an object for my
own ego satisfaction and my own feelings of superiority and specialness. Of
course, God will not let Gods self be used in this way. In Gods
goodness, God allows my spirit to be plunged into a dark night of the
soul, until I am ready to experience Gods love in such a way that
it only contributes to the greater glory of God.
I understand well the Sufi prayer: Give me the pain of your
love, O Lord and not the joy. Give the joy to others, but give me the
pain! The pain of Gods love is the longing for that love from a
sense of deprivation. That pain purifies me and makes me ready to experience
the positive joy of Gods presence. So in moments of dark night, I make an
act of trust that through this emptiness and privation God is purifying me and
making me ready to share in Gods joy.
John McNeill was a Jesuit for nearly 40 years before being
expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987 for his views on gay and lesbian
sexuality. Since 1975 he has been a practicing psychotherapist and a frequent
lecturer on spirituality and gay and lesbian issues. This excerpt is from
Chapter 30, My Spiritual Life from Both Feet Firmly Planted in
Midair: My Spiritual Journey, published in 1998 by Westminster John
Knox Press.
National Catholic Reporter, April 14,
2000
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