My hunch is that songs like Psalm 63 are what made David a man after God's own heart. Not his virtue, but his passionate longing for God.
I thirst for you.
My body faints for you.
Your love is better than life.
I think of you as I lie in my bed.
I meditate on you through the night.
For most of my life I can't say I ever thirsted for God. And that was mostly due, in hindsight, to never having seen God. But when I was on retreat at Taizé a few years ago, there with my dear friends Hannah and Jojo, I did gaze upon God. As, it seemed, David did: "I gaze on you in the sanctuary." And ever since that time, I have been thirsty for God. I've longed for God.
Have I seen God since? Yes and no. No in that I haven't experienced a vision of God that had the same vibrancy or directness. (Words are failing me here.) But also yes in that I've come close in times of prayer, like seeing God out of the corner of my eye. But mostly I've lived in a profound and persisting afterglow. Everything seems irradiated. Being is suffused with light. Haloed. God is just very, very obvious to me. All the time. I was having coffee with a friend who was struggling with his faith. He asked me, "Do you ever see God?" My response was, "Goodness, I see God right now. Right here. Shining around you. In that coffee cup you're holding. In this room. It's all filled with light. I see God all the time."
I'm sharing all this, with a lot of hesitance and self-consciousness, to draw our attention to the mystical, experiential core at the heart of the Psalms. And not just the Psalms, but the entire life of faith. This is the story I try to share in Hunting Magic Eels. And having shared that book with the world, I've encountered some interesting reactions. I've had skeptical and disenchanted readers say things like, "I didn't really agree with this part of the book." Or, "One problem I had with the book." And I want to respond: "For Pete's sake, the book isn't an argument, it's an invitation to see. I couldn't give two flips about what you agree or disagree with, did you even try any of the things I invited you to try? God is not a philosophical proposition to kick around on a podcast. God is a reality to be encountered."
I've shared it before, but I'll share it again, Karl Rahner's belief about faith in the modern world:
"The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’—someone who has ‘experienced something’—or will cease to be anything at all."
