On prayer

To be fed by your hunger,
this is prayer.

3 comments:

Brad East said...

Love this one.

Joshua said...

So the thirst of the psalmist in 42 & 43 is the very thing that waters him? Where do God and the enemies fit into this.

I was going to post an extensive rebuttal to your vignette, but you can't argue with an aphorism, so I guess I'll just ponder it for the rest of the day.

I used to think that you could be a truly captivating poet if only you could write a 15 or 20-line poem as good as your 2-line poems, but maybe minimalism is just your style. If one of your poems was on display at the Moder Art Museum of Fort Worth, it would be on a tiny little canvas without a frame in the center of a huge concrete wall.

David said...

Yeah, it does seem a bit unbiblical doesn't it, Josh? This is definitely drawn from personal experience rather than theological reflection. I had in mind something Henri Nouwen said, "The closer I become with God, the more I long for him. And the more I long for him, the closer we become." This strikes me as true, at least in my own prayer life. I continue to try to find ways to name the dreadful loneliness we experience as somehow related to God.

That said, I don't think that kind of move is absent in the psalter. A great deal of the psalms are spoken in pain and we don't hear God's response. What we have in the psalms is a collection of broken lives lived before God and, as they are part of the canon, the church has called that faith. I think that is the tradition I am trying to align myself with, to somehow connect the loneliness, the utter silence, with God.

I loved the metaphor of the Art Museum. I think that fits my aesthetic nicely. Also, I am too lazy to write longer.