Longing for God
Do you ever experience moments of extreme nothingness in the midst of the world? I mean when you’re sitting there, even surrounded by family, and you think that everything around you, by its own merit, is nothing. That without God nothing has value and, as Pope Benedict points out in Spe Salvi, there is no hope. Much of his encyclical revolves around St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in which he tells the Gentiles that for a time they were “alienated from the community of Israel…without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12).
At these times, when the nothingness of the world creeps into my senses, I have a renewed longing for God and proclaim with the psalmist:
O God, thou art my God, I seek thee,
my soul thirsts for thee;
my flesh faints for thee,
as in a dry and weary land where no water is.
So I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary,
beholding thy power and glory.
Because thy steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise thee.
So I will bless thee as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on they name.
(Ps. 631-4)