Feels like truth

How confidently the desires
of God are spoken of!
Perhaps God wants
something quite different.
Or nothing, nothing at all.

From The Tide by Denise Levertov – The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes

I’ve read these stanzas many times in the past week or so. They have captured me. They unnerve me. They disarm me. They frustrate me. They give me rest. Must be good poetry.

‘Feels like truth.

How often I have spoken with confidence of what I believe God desires – for myself, for others, in situations and circumstances. How often I have been wrong. And how many more times it’s not that I’ve been wrong, it’s just that I clearly haven’t known a thing about what God wants. It often has been the absence of God’s activity or action or even seeming desire that has left me achingly aware that I do not understand the God I claim to know.

What if that God – that mysterious, confusing, in-many-ways-unknowable-God desires nothing, nothing at all?

Who is the subject of the verb from Levertov’s point of view? I want to make it me…not surprisingly. But what if I make it God?

If I do, then my limited comprehension of what God might desire OF me may not be all that important. If God’s desire OF me is something quite different and perhaps nothing, nothing at all? Well, that’s a far cry from what I’ve been taught, told, and read about. And how lovely would it be if it could possibly be true? More than just lovely poetry? Just true?

I think it might be what Levertov felt was true. She says it many times and in many ways:

This clinging to a God
for whom one does
nothing.
A loyalty
without deeds.

From Psalm Fragments

What if nothing were required of me? What if that were God’s desire: that I do (or can do) nothing, need do nothing? That I cling to a God – loyally – without deeds? As often as I tell myself to not compare God’s love to human love, I still do it – both in terms of what’s required of me and, frankly, what I require/demand/need of God. But this concept – of nothing required – shatters that metaphor and sends me walking across the broken, but radiant glass of mystery, of nothingness, of desire. That feels like God.

Mmmmm. ‘Feels like truth.

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