Deep Calls to Deep: Wild Advent

    As a deer longs for flowing streams,

so my soul longs for you, O God.

2 

My soul thirsts for God,

    for the living God.

When shall I come and behold

    the face of God?

3 

My tears have been my food

    day and night,

while people say to me continually,

    “Where is your God?”

4 

These things I remember,

    as I pour out my soul:

how I went with the throng

    and led them in procession to the house of God,

with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,

    a multitude keeping festival.

5 

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

    and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God, for I shall again praise him,

my help 

6 

and my God.

My soul is cast down within me;

    therefore I remember you

from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,

    from Mount Mizar.

7 

Deep calls to deep

    at the thunder of your torrents;

all your waves and your billows

    have gone over me.

8 

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,

    and at night his song is with me,

    a prayer to the God of my life.

9 

I say to God, my rock,

    “Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully

    because the enemy oppresses me?”

10 

As with a deadly wound in my body,

    my adversaries taunt me,

while they say to me continually,

    “Where is your God?”

11 

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

    and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God, for I shall again praise him,

    my help and my God.

~~Psalm 42 (NRSV)

For anyone who has ever felt they have lost their connection to the divine, this poem is for us. The psalmist gets us. The world cannot fill the God-sized hole in a soul that has known the love of God. Even churches, bless their sweet hearts, can miss the mark when it comes to satisfying the longing for more substance, more depth.

Feel me? Thanks for that.

And yet there is hope. The light will return. We know it deep in our bones. And so we wait (again) in the wilderness for the advent of its first dawning.