You Are Made For God

My soul yearns for you in the night,

my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. (Isaiah 26:8-9)

The soul’s desire, the soul’s yearning, is for the living God.

Saint Augustine, writing in the fourth century, described the transcendent dimension this way: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” God designed us with a deep longing that manifests itself in restlessness. And the restlessness will persist until we find that inner connection with God—the God who has been pursuing us through our longing.

The seventeenth-century mathematician, scientist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal also described the inner longing:

This craving, . . . he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only by God himself.

The “infinite abyss” cannot be filled by any of the things we think will fill that void. It cannot be fulfilled by anything other than “God himself.”

What are some things that make you aware of the transcendent dimension?

The transcendent dimension is a built-in, factory-included potency that is always present, even if it is not acknowledged. It is the deepest part within our embodied souls, and the least visible. It is directing our lives even if we are unaware. As Dallas Willard has written, “‘Spiritual’ is not just something we ought to be. It is something we are and cannot escape.” It is influencing us even if we have not named it; it is unfolding within us every day; it sparks our greatest dreams, and fuels our greatest accomplishments. It is the source of the deep, inward intuitions that guide us.

Our spirits have a built-in divine receptivity. It is the infinite abyss Pascal described. It is the reason the Spirit can bear witness with our spirit: “You have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15-16). For me, the longing I felt, which could not be met by positive thinking or chanting a mantra, was finally met when I encountered Jesus on the pages of the Gospels. The Holy Spirit filled the Christ-form of my soul. My embodied soul found its rest in Jesus.

Jesus said, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). God is spirit, and you and I have a spirit; it is how we connect to God. And it is how we connect to goodness, nobility, truth, and beauty. Humans cultivate those things because we are human, because we are unceasing spiritual beings. And Jesus was human and spiritual, as we are.

I studied how Jesus practiced the spiritual disciplines, searching the Gospels for clues about how he connected to God through reading the Scriptures (he clearly knew them), about worship (he went to the synagogue), and about his prayer life. What struck me the most was Jesus’ private prayer practice and how frequently we are told that he prayed. In Luke’s Gospel alone we are told that Jesus would “withdraw to deserted places and pray” (Luke 5:16). Luke records twelve instances of this. Why would Luke tell us this so many times? I think because it was a central part of his life—Jesus entered solitude in order to engage with the Father.

And Jesus was clearly aware of the false narrative that we can find the answer to our longing in the things of this world. He told a rich young ruler to give away his possessions, not because possessions are bad, but because the young man was possessed by his possessions and would never find what he was looking for in them. Jesus stood up to the devil in the desert, who tried to tempt him with power and earthly wealth and validation. He said no; he said no for us and on our behalf. And now we can do the same. We can say no to the treasures of earth so we can say yes to the treasures of heaven. God can and does bless us with various earthly treasures, but seeking them as ends in themselves will leave us empty and unfulfilled. In contrast, viewing them as means to the end of loving and glorifying God will bring us joy—seeking the treasures of heaven will satisfy our souls.

How does the transcendent dimension work in our everyday lives? We have been given a mind that is capable of receiving the directives of the transcendent dimension. Paul encourages the Colossians to set their minds on things above (Colossians 3:2), and he encourages the Philippians to think about “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, [anything of] excellence and . . . worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8).

Our minds are designed to take in the things of God. This is why Paul said to set our minds on the Spirit—our minds are built to receive transcendent directives. Think about a time you listened to a sermon and caught an insight, or read the Bible and a word or phrase came alive and started a chain reaction of new ideas about God and the kingdom of God. Our minds are the primary place God interacts with us. We have the ability to apprehend and appraise divine things. Jesus had this ability as well: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes (Philippians 2:5, italics added).

We also have a transcendent will. Our will is our capacity to choose, to decide, and to act. We are endowed with the ability to make things happen. So when we apprehend a divine directive, such as “trust in the Lord,” we begin to trust God as seen in our actions, and this is done by our will. Our will decides, and by our will we persevere. We need the consent of our mind and our will to accomplish great things for God.

God has also endowed us with the ability to remember. Saint Augustine wrote extensively about the divine gift of memory. We use our memory all of the time. As I write, I am remembering the meaning of every word I type. I learned what “memory” means, and I remembered it. The transcendent dimension of our memory involves our ability to imagine. We have the ability to conceive of things because of our memories. When we planted a new church twenty-five years ago, my colleague Jeff Gannon and I imagined what this new church could be like on the basis of other churches we remembered.

We did not build the church out of nothing. In our memory we knew what churches are supposed to look like, and with our imagination we dreamed of what a new one might be. And we anticipated with great enthusiasm what this church might be. Now, looking back over twenty-five years of life together, we can see how we used our minds and will and memory and imagination to do something great for God. Lives have been changed over this span of time: people have heard the good news, lived in fellowship with one another, and partaken of the sacraments that bind us together thousands of times. God gave us not only a transcendent longing, but a transcendent mind, will, and memory to make it a reality.

The first awakening of our transcendent dimension comes in infancy. When we look into the smiling gaze of our mother, father, or caregiver, the transcendent dimension is awakened. We realize we are a person, an “I,” and that there is another person, a “Thou,” who has connected with us. A precious smile occurs when an infant sees the smile of another smiling back at them—into their eyes, which are the window to our soul—that affirming gaze awakens the transcendent.

When a family pauses for prayer before a meal, a child begins to recognize the sacred aspect of reality. Transcendent inspirations are awakened by our environment: the sight of our mother lighting a candle, or a minister presiding over a worship service, or someone speaking about their experiences of God are ways the transcendent is awakened. In my own family there were moments the transcendent was awakened in me. When we took family trips in our car, my mother and father would often sing, and one song that really stood out to me was “Go Down, Moses.” My dad singing “Let my people go,” with his deep baritone voice, sent a quiver in my body.

Transcendent formation will depend on the quality of the spiritual life a child is exposed to. My mother had a deep longing for God that was real and stayed with me even when I was far from God, when I wanted nothing to do with church. She witnessed wordlessly to a deeper life that would one day become central to me. She never forced her faith on me. There was a silent appeal, a call I could not escape. I am grateful my own children have grown up as believers, and I hold out hope with friends whose children have left the faith that they will return. As the often quoted verse tells us: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6 KJV).

My friend John likes to say that every Christian needs a “mountaintop experience” at least once a year. By mountaintop he means those times of spiritual elation, or strengthening—those moments, often on retreat or at a Christian event, when God seems incredibly near. My friend Mimi speaks often of those “thin places,” as the Celtic Christians called them, where it seems as if the veil between heaven and earth is razor thin. I think there is a lot of truth to this. We are made for transcendence, and summit experiences provide a great deal of strength.

For many years I have hosted the Apprentice Gathering, a three-day retreat featuring great speakers and workshops all dealing with Christian spiritual formation. Every year something powerful happens, something that we have no control over and cannot compel to happen. At some point, the room we are in begins to feel like it glows with the presence and power of God. A kind of glory enters into our midst and makes the place and the people within it feel holy. When transcendent, God-seeking people gather together to experience God’s transcendence, God shows up in powerful ways.

I think this happens also because we plan and prepare for it. Not just those of us who organize it, but the people who come. They have spent time planning to meet God. They have chosen to detach themselves from their ordinary, busy, distracted lives for a time in order to focus on their transcendent dimension. And in that context, something powerful happens. More often than not, people come home having been deeply spoken to by God. I used to joke that “God must only speak in the woods,” because God is so vocal on retreats in the woods. Of course, it is not the woods that make it happen; it is because the people who go to the woods have set aside a time to slow down, be quiet, and be present.

List some ways you can remain open to the transcendent in your ordinary life.

The challenge for us is what to do when we come back from a summit experience. We enter back into the same routines, the same overbooked, loud, busy lives we normally live, and suddenly it can seem as if God went deaf. Our capacity to connect has not changed; the light of our transcendent dimension has not dimmed—our focus has shifted. The web of everydayness has taken over. The challenge is to remain open to the transcendent in our ordinary lives.

We cannot always live on retreat. We cannot always stay at the summit. But we can discover the infinite in the finite; we can learn how “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower,” as William Blake wrote. The transcendent dimension of our embodied soul is looking for inspiration and aspiration all of the time, but most of the time we neglect it. We have to train ourselves to see it.

Fr. Adrian van Kaam was a young priest in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. He lived through the Dutch Famine, also known as the “Hunger Winter” of 1944–1945. He noticed that in extreme deprivation, people could still connect to the transcendent. He found that the people who during times of suffering could still see divine beauty, could still see the glory of the present moment, and could attend to the epiphanies all around them, fared much better than those who could not.

He built his entire understanding of the soul during this fertile period. He came up with a phrase I love, “awe-filled attentive abiding.” For Fr. Van Kaam, this meant living with “appreciative abandonment.” Think about a small child watching a butterfly for the first time. They are filled with excitement and awe; the butterfly creates a sense of wonder and joy.

But as we grow older, we lose the excitement, the awe, the wonder, and the joy in such moments. Instead of appreciative abandonment, we train ourselves to think depreciatively. We become blind to the glory and instead focus on the negative. We see what is wrong, not what is right, about people and circumstances. All the while, we are postponing joy.

When is the last time you experienced attentive abiding and appreciative abandonment?

Transcendent presence in daily life does not mean we ignore our problems. It does not mean simply thinking positively. Nor is it a trancelike state of existence. Instead, it means lifting every problem, every person, every situation into the light of our loving God’s ultimate meaning. It is not trying to eliminate our problems, but to elevate them. We see daily life, from laundry to committee meetings to cooking dinner, with an awareness that God longs to connect with us through all of it. Nurturing the transcendent means keeping our eyes and ears open to the wonder of each moment.

One Sunday afternoon my family and friends and I were out on our deck, enjoying the sun, playing a board game, listening to music, and laughing. I paused for a moment and tried to soak it all in. The wonder of these marvelous human beings suddenly hit me. I did not look at them as anything other than epiphanies of grace. Our new puppy, Wesley, began playing with our older dog, Winston. They rolled around in the grass and it made me smile till my face hurt. Then, without warning, our neighbor’s barbershop quartet started rehearsing in their backyard. The sound of the human voices and the harmony of the bass, the tenors, and the baritone elevated my embodied soul. When it ended, our whole neighborhood erupted in applause.

Van Kaam writes, “Many people reach only incidentally a transcendent view of life. . . . Few persons seem to live a life that allows transcendence to blossom forth and to permeate their formation as such.” I want transcendence to blossom in my life as much as possible. Each day we can seize the Spirit because God loves to take our hand in every moment—we can nurture and nourish the good and beautiful transcendent dimension of our lives, and linger in awe at these moments of life until they blossom forth.

I love the poem “For Longing” by John O’Donohue. It speaks of how God longs for each of us and how that longing brought us into being. And it speaks of how our longing for God is but a reflection of God’s longing for us. May this benediction, and the truth behind it, quicken your soul with wonder:

May you come to accept your longing as divine

urgency.