Longing for God

Longing for God is the enduring desire for a deeper awareness of God, and in this book it links mystical experience to prayer, perseverance, and care for others. It is neither a technique for producing extraordinary states nor a feeling reserved for the cloister. The desire can be trained through ordinary spiritual practices, but its fulfillment remains a gift; its significance lies as much in the life it shapes as in the moments of awareness it may bring.

Desire, gift, and spiritual endurance

The book distinguishes between longing for God and the experience of God. Mystics may be surprised by an experience that no one can compel or manufacture; ultimately, it is described as a gift. Yet desire matters: the search is not passive indifference. The author identifies a deep longing for God as a theme of his own later life and credits the mystics he studied with a lifetime of guidance, inspiration, and education. His social-justice concerns did not disappear as this desire deepened; he also published Tough Minds, Tender Hearts, a book on the spirituality of social activists. The inward search and concern for public life remain alongside one another.

That search meets resistance. The attractions of the world can distract, while difficulties involving health, economics, relationships, or faith can obscure awareness of God. The account does not promise continuous consolation: there may be insight and serious growth, but awareness of the divine can be fleeting. Longing therefore includes perseverance through apparent setbacks, rather than treating each dry or uncertain period as proof that the search has failed. The book’s writers repeatedly return to love of God and of one another, and to the possibility of an inward depth where the world and sin have not exhausted a person’s capacity to respond to divine mercy, grace, forgiveness, and love.

Scripture and the disciplines of seeking

The Psalms give longing a shared language. Psalm 42 begins with the image of a deer longing for flowing streams and turns that image into the soul’s desire for God. Through centuries of Christian practice, the Psalms have served as a prayer book; praying them is also a staple of monastic prayer. Their language makes desire speakable without suggesting that words can contain its object.

A trip to Gethsemani gave the book’s author a practical form for this discipline. When a student asked a monk how to develop a deeper prayer life, the monk replied, “Do what we do, pray the Psalms.” The advice became a steady practice for the author, who learned to probe the songs and poems more deeply. Its modesty matters: a regular prayer need not be an elaborate undertaking to orient a life toward God.

The book recommends building an inner life through prayer, meditation, study, and silence. A person might begin with a Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, add a few minutes of silence, and later include a Gospel reading or experiment with meditation. A church service can also become an occasion for more focused attention. The point is not to accumulate practices mechanically, but to become more open and receptive. The cumulative effect of simple practices across years may matter more than any single experience. With time, events once attributed to chance or coincidence may appear in a different light, as moments in which divine action had not yet been recognized.

Mystical desire from the monastery inward

Bernard of Clairvaux makes desire central to his account of contemplative life. In his sermons on the Song of Songs, he teaches that mystical experience is inward rather than sensory: nothing need be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted for an encounter with God to be real. He describes desire as preparing the soul for such an encounter, writing that “holy desire ought to precede his advent to every soul whom he will visit.” The image is not of a person commanding an experience, but of a life made ready to receive what cannot be summoned at will.

Bernard’s own account preserves the distance between what he has received and what he still wants. In Sermon 9, he gives thanks for divine favors while acknowledging that “They are less than what I long for.” Elsewhere he recalls coldness and hardness of heart during his early conversion, even while seeking the God he wanted to love. At times, he says, an inward renewal came unexpectedly. His longing thus persists through both consolation and spiritual chill; neither possession nor absence settles it once and for all.

The account of union associated with John of Ruusbroec likewise joins self-offering to continuing desire. A person offers works and self in seeking God’s presence, then leaves both behind in the movement toward God. This is not an identification of the human with God: the distinction remains. The experience generates habitual love, virtue, and an inclination beyond the self, yet also a hunger that is never satisfied. Longing is therefore not simply a lack that disappears at the point of contact. It can deepen through the very experience it seeks.

Recognition in lives and recollections

Augustine’s Confessions presents longing through the shape of a remembered life. The book’s author recalls first encountering mysticism as a term in a college lecture, but says that reading Augustine gave the idea substance. In the familiar opening formulation, human hearts are restless until they rest in God. The author reads Confessions not only as an account of sin but, more importantly, as a confession of faith: Augustine’s account of touching Wisdom and becoming aware of divine presence altered the author’s understanding of religion and began a lifelong interest in mysticism. The retrospective narrative matters because it shows a later reader finding a vocabulary for religious experience through another person’s written recollection.

Simone Weil’s account connects longing with attention practiced under difficult conditions. At Solesmes, a young English Catholic introduced her to George Herbert’s poem “Love.” She learned it by heart and recited it as a prayer when headaches were at their worst. During one recitation she experienced Christ’s presence, without the involvement of her senses or imagination. Later, she and a friend learned the Our Father in Greek. Weil tried to say it each morning with absolute attention, starting again whenever her attention wandered. She came to understand perfect prayer as perfect attention: not a demand for an intense feeling, but a sustained orientation toward God.

Other accounts widen the concept beyond private prayer. George Fox’s belief in “that of God in every person” is associated with Quaker silent worship, in which people listen for the Holy Spirit and may speak when moved. Dorothy Day’s religious life likewise centers on recognizing God in other people. She understood Matthew 25 to mean that acts of feeding, welcoming, clothing, and visiting people in need are acts toward Christ. The guests who came to Catholic Worker houses could be difficult to help, but hospitality was not contingent on their appearing saintly or easy to love. For Day, the hiddenness of Christ among them made practical care a form of religious recognition.

A continuing practice, not a promised climax

The author’s own routine and the book’s closing counsel resist the expectation that longing must culminate in spectacular experience. At Gethsemani, where the author and his wife spend a week on retreat each year, a sign in the Guest House reads, “Silence is spoken here.” The phrase evokes a setting for stillness, but the author also notes that Protestants share the retreat space. The recurring visit and the monthly Thomas Merton discussion group held often in Merton’s hermitage place spiritual inquiry within a continuing practice and community.

The book’s conclusion brings prayer, silence, fasting, worship with others, and a simple way of life together. For the mystics it describes, religion is not a leisure-time activity detached from the rest of life. At the same time, readers are advised not to expect extraordinary experiences on demand. God may be sought in the ordinary, simple aspects of life, and moments of divine presence may alternate with experiences of absence. Longing for God names the persistence that carries a person through that alternation: attentive practice without a guarantee, and openness to a presence that may be recognized only later.