This psalm opens with a powerful image of a person - possibly King David, but really anyone - who is seeking a relationship with God: "my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water."
Because our scriptures reflect the experience of a desert people, the image of intense thirst is a frequent biblical metaphor of our thirst for God. The question is: is this an image or a metaphor that has any power to describe our own experience?
Dartmouth College, like many other American colleges, was established by people who thought that the search for God was the central fact in human experience. The college's primary purpose, at the beginning, was to train people who might proclaim to native Americans and others the conviction that the Christian gospel was both living water and the bread of life for everyone.
That conviction, so central to the early college, has become more and more peripheral to its contemporary life, so much so that one may well question whether such a purpose retains any currency at all. If Dartmouth students are thirsty for anything, we may gather the impression that it is for beer. And many would argue that rum was the essential spirit of the early college. More thoughtful students and staff may reject distilled or fermented spirits as satisfying their existential thirst, but they may conclude that such thirsts can either never be satisfied, or can be satisfied by any number of spiritual paths, or by the search for empirical knowledge. Few seem willing to proclaim that the God of Israel, or Jesus Christ, is what all human beings are seeking. Such a claim seems to many intolerant at best, imperialistic at worst, and so this proclamation, once so important to the public purposes of the college, is now relegated to the private, and preferably silent, realm.
But the fact is that if human beings are programmed to seek meaning and purpose in their lives, then they are always searching for God. No matter how secular Dartmouth has become, if the biblical vision is accurate, students and staff are searching for God. It is possible, of course, to have a purpose in life, and to find meaning in life, in other ways than through the explicit search for God. But the biblical tradition is clear in saying that other paths do not lead to satisfaction. We can accept the biblical tradition, or not. We can and must interpret that tradition anew. But let us be clear about what it says. And in this case, it says. repeatedly, that the search for God is the most important thing a human does, and that the only God to be found is the God of Israel.
And so, I ask you two questions: One - Do you in your own experience think that you and your contemporaries are searching for God? and two: if is true, where are you looking?
I have discussed this question with several thoughtful students. One of them told me this. He said - and I paraphrase: "Students at Dartmouth are being taught critical thinking. This means that they are not ready yet to accept any central truth about God. They just think about the various options in the world, and they enjoy the opportunities put before them to have fun. But later on, when they are ready, they will have the tools to examine faith claims and to sort them all out, and then maybe they will choose to make a commitment to a spiritual path. Or maybe they will reject all such paths. In either case, they will use the tools of critical inquiry that they have learned here." I think this is a fair summary of what students are taught here - don't you? And it is necessary. There are thousands of religious claims vying for our attention. How do we decide which ones, if any, merit our attention, much less our devotion? Is it just a matter of affirming our own family's tradition, whatever it may be? Is it that we are seeking a relationship with God that satisfies our sense of logic? How do we decide?
In this psalm, the psalmist proclaims: "So I have looked upon you in your sanctuary, beholding your power and glory." We meet today in this sanctuary, built to reflect a public faith. Now it is, for most, a relic; but for some of us, it is still a sanctuary. where we meet, in small groups and individually, to acknowledge the mystery of being, to think, to pray. Perhaps others look elsewhere. We can only testify to our own experience, which, for some of us, is like psalmist's: "Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I love' I will lift up my hands and call upon your name. My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips." In the end, we do not find God; God finds us. What we call seeking is only paying attention to the way our life unfolds, to the clues that are put in front of us. And one of those clues is the history we inhabit. We can never passively accept someone else's faith as our own. But we would be foolish indeed to reject, without exploration, the faith that has sustained the world and the people who have nourished us.
May all of you who are seeking, find, knowing that the very act of seeking is evidence that you have already been found. Amen.
©2006 Richard R. Crocker
