In Touch with God through Hunger and Thirst

Bought a fat fountain pen. Thought about staying in touch with God. Journaling might be a way. Bought a nice notepad. On my recliner last night tried to use my nice new pen with my nice new notepad. Started my journaling piece with thoughts about drifting off toward depression as I join millions of others negotiating pains and incapacities.

Agonizing pain in my writing thumb.

I’ll have to put the nice pen away—maybe use it to sign something…some day.

I’ll have to give my nice notebook to Connie.

But the real impetus remains: How to keep in touch with God.

Dylan sang it, “Don’t let me drift too far. Keep me where you are.”

What I wanted to record was my insight that came as I biked down the trail with the dogs. Stay in touch how? The most real and constant place where I meet God is in hunger and thirst. Blended in with the dawning of awareness of God and Good was hunger and thirst. It has never ever slacked, even through those tunnel dark days of longing for love, losing love, and almost losing sanity.

And above that basso continuo line of hunger and thirst has been the notes of ecstasy when I was absorbed into a sense of the absolute center of the Circle of Belonging. When I felt not only myself being affirmed, but the awareness of absolute, infinite, Universal Affirmation of all life, and death, and life.

Patients dying in my arms at Lutheran Hospital.

Nursing home people in comas mouthing the Lord’s Prayer with me.

Mental health patients desperate to feel their way through the fog.

Downs Syndrome people reaching out. Too good for this world.

Smiling, blind, and legless woman. Smiling over the pearl of great price.

Dearly beloved telling me to stop with that “Jesus shit.”

You and I are all One in hungering and thirsting.

Feel it and stay in touch.