God-given thirst

Spiritual thirst is a gift from God, declared Alexander Schmemann in one of the talks he delivered to Russian Christians suffering under communism. In the face of this God-given yearning, he said, "complete ideologies have sprung up, based on the rejection and renunciation of spiritual thirst, on hatred toward it."

This is pertinent in light of recent news that more Americans are eschewing the title of "Christian" in favor of . . . nothing. This is to be expected in a time when young people upon leaving home are increasingly likely to leave the Church as well, and in a country where a good many self-labeled Christians can't muster much in the way of dogmatic knowledge. After all, it is difficult to believe in something when one hasn't a clue what that something is.

This suggests a continued sharpening of two antithetical views of mankind's existence. "One view," said Schmemann, "affirms that man is man precisely because of the spiritual thirst within him, a searching, a restlessness for transcendence. For the other, man begins his human destiny only after having killed this thirst." In other words, what we are seeing in the secularization of the West is the victory of that second, modern worldview---the ahistorical, unnatural vision of man as an areligious being.

Religion is natural to man because it is, as Schmemann writes, "the sign and presence in this world of spiritual thirst." Its destruction can only coincide with the suppression within man of his God-given thirst. I don't know where Schmemann stood on the feasibility of such a reshaping, but I suspect it is impossible. Man can only forsake the living water when he finds something else to drink, be it the wine of worldly comfort or the fetid swamp of false gods.

Perhaps no greater portion of our countrymen is drinking swamp water now than in earlier decades. After all, the reality behind these latest numbers may not be a falling away so much as greater truth in advertising. For instance, we all know self-styled Christians who are an embarrassment to the faith and to the Church.

Perhaps I'm not the only one who has been such a Christian. It is this thirst from God for God that drew me back to the Church. It drew me back despite all that is in the world to draw me away, and all that is in man's inventions to repel me. I suspect we will only see a continuation, in our lives and in the lives of our children, in this clarifying line between thirst and deadening, between natural man and unholy fabrication. Perhaps this latest news, while not surprising, is a reason to pause and ask why people who have been in our churches seem to have left with their thirst unquenched.