Christian spirituality: Better than life
The human heart constantly thirsts for loyal, enduring and steadfast love
We are in the heart of summer. We have had to quickly adapt to this yearly surge of heat, and while we enjoy the long summer days and the time spent outdoors with family and friends, we cannot but become aware that this hostile heat is a reminder that fundamentally we are persons moved by thirst.
Like a dry and parched land, so is the human heart constantly thirsting for something more. While we speak of having the need for water, food and the other basic elements for survival, we use the term desire when the thing we lack somehow remains elusive, never really achieved. We might get a glimpse of what we desire, but never a sharp image of it. Like the horizon, it is always ahead of us.
Psalm 63 is the psalm of desire par excellence. Like most psalms, it is attributed to David while he wanders in the desert, the place which more than any other brings human beings in direct contact with their innermost desires.
In the desert, he remembers that glimpse he got of the Lord while he was in the sanctuary. Hundreds of miles away from that sanctuary, he now finds himself in a place where his desire is ignited.
Without a taste of 'hesed' that corresponds to our deepest desires, life would lose much of its flavour
Further on in the psalmody, Psalm 107 identifies four categories of people whose desire is completely engaged. There are those who wander in the desert wastelands, helplessly looking for a city to settle in. Next are the merchants who sail the mighty waters yearning for a harbour that provides them shelter. Then, there are those who take the route of rebellion and protest, seeking to carve a path of their own, getting tired of fighting and desiring a new start. Finally, there are those who imprison themselves in the chains of their sorrows, waiting for somebody to give them a taste of freedom.
As much as the psalms explore without fear or prejudice the deepest crevices of the human heart, they also explore with equal conviction a deeper response that comes to meet human desire right where it finds itself, whether it is lost in the desert, fighting the waves or trying to rise above its gloominess.
For the psalmist, there is an answer to our deepest desires. It is called hesed. This short and weirdly sounding word can be translated as a loyal, enduring and steadfast love. In whichever way it is translated, human beings cannot create it for themselves. It has to be shown to them by he who planted that very desire in the first place.
Daringly enough, the psalms make a very provocative statement. This hesed love is preferable to life itself, not because life has no inherent value, but because without a taste of hesed that corresponds to our deepest desires, life would lose much of its flavour.
Without a proper response to our deepest desires, we either manufacture surrogate responses, or more seriously, stop carrying that tension in our hearts out of discouragement and a general state of bitterness. Those who make a concrete experience of hesed will, despite or rather because of their desires, arrive at gratitude and a spirit of praise, because somebody listened and responded when nobody and nothing else could.