Is Some Wanting of God Still In Your Heart?

".... And that the whole meaning of our existence and the one consuming desire of the heart of God is that we should let ourselves be loved, many spiritual persons would smile at my naïveté.

They are likely to murmer: 'But we know all that; we can read that in any spiritual book.. does she think she is telling us something new?' All I can say is that, although I too have known this in Theory, it is only now that it is integrated into my life. What is more looking at my dear friends, living for God, wanting only him, I see in fact that something is yet wanting to them...... 

They feel they are spiritual failures because this has not happened to them and that has not happen ed to them; they feel they have missed out on something because their experience carries none of the features which treatises on prayer and the contemplative life seem to demand as signs of a truly authentic spiritual life. They know they are loved by God and are pleasing to him and yet there is an indefinable anxiety.....

It seems to me that God is asking one thing more and only one thing more, and this, precisely, is what they are refusing to give. It is, in fact, the deepest self-denial and so different from the ways in which they are seeking to do things for God and, as it were, trying to wrest God's good pleasure from his reluctant heart. This refusal seems to me to spring from lack of insight and understanding, certainly not from lack of goodwill. I see these dear people, self giving, generous to a degree, full of life for God and yet still anxious, still hesitant before the last step which will release them from themselves and bury them in God. I see them turning, with a sense of failure, to new ideas on prayer which might perhaps "work better" though this is certainly not the term they would use...... 

I long them that there is no need for this, that here and now, in their present "unsatisfactory" state, in their "failure", God is giving himself to them, that this state of poverty is precisely what he wants and his way into them. 

- Ruth Burrows (she is a Carmelite Nun)