“What would you like to drink?” is a question we hear when we visit someone’s home, enter a drive-through or sit down at a restaurant.  Usually we know what we’d like, and we get what we want.   Sometimes, though, we make a bad choice.   We choose something that will slake our thirst, but not something as healthy as it should be.    We get what we want, but maybe not what we need.   If our host or the employee replied to us, “Well, you shouldn’t be drinking that,” and gave us a glass of water instead, we’d probably never go back to that restaurant again.

When we pray, we are sitting down to a conversation with God, and God virtually says to us, “What would you like to drink?”     But after we speak up, telling God what we want, God sometimes gives us something else, something that feels like the wrong menu item.  Some people twist that into a complaint that they never get what they want anyway, so why bother to pray?

Psalm 63 comes from a person who is ready to receive whatever God serves.   It doesn’t say, “My soul is thirsting for coffee” or “for beer”, but “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.”   “For you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.”   That’s coming from someone who is truly thirsting.  The person singing this psalm is not distracted by other things that would be nice to have.  Instead, the Psalmist declares: “I gazed toward you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory.”  

We sing this psalm today because the First Reading tells us how Jeremiah the prophet tried praying for what he wanted, but didn’t like the results.  So, just as we may wish to do when we don’t get what we want, Jeremiah said, “I’m outta here.”   The prophet tells us he  actually quit praying:  “I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.”   

This is not a guy who simply got distracted while trying to pray, but a guy who deliberately sought out distractions to keep from praying.  When he listened to God, Jeremiah got the message loud and clear, but he didn’t like the message.    So he kept quiet about it.    That did not work. Jeremiah discovered something about his relationship to God: You can never get out of it, even if you try to switch it off.   When Jeremiah ignores the message, he says, the name of God “becomes like a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.”  Jeremiah’s soul was thirsting.

Peter’s soul was thirsting as well.     Like the other disciples and most Jewish people of his time, Peter was longing for a Messiah.   He prayed for a Savior who would vanquish the occupying forces of Rome and establish God’s kingdom.    But what Peter got was Jesus saying he was going to Jerusalem to suffer greatly, then die.   Peter said: “God forbid”.  He wasn’t thinking as God does.  Peter was looking for the wrong thing to satisfy his thirst.

Like Peter, we also think as human beings do, not as God does.   We have probably discovered that if we have not been praying regularly or deeply, something is “off”.   We notice that something is missing from our lives; something has gone off the rails.  We get more irritable, we make bad decisions, and then we try to defend them.  Our soul is thirsting.

Psalm 63 shows us that God meets us in the desert of our lives, the place where we are thirsting, if only we recognize that it is God that we are thirsting for.   It could be that we have not been listening to God as sincerely as we could.  

If you find yourself like Jeremiah, avoiding prayer, ask this question, “What am I really thirsting for?”   Am I thirsting for something I shouldn’t have?   Am I thirsting for a relationship I’d better avoid?  Am I thirsting for an end to a conflict I started?   Am I thirsting for a deeper love than I am willing to give?   Sometimes we are wrong about our thirst.

Because we know what thirst feels like, we think we know what will slake it.  But that isn’t always true.  Thirst always feels the same, no matter what we use to slake it.  The real thirst within us is always a thirst for God.  Through prayer, we may find out just what we are thirsting for – or whom we are thirsting for.  When we reach to God for the right drink, he will give us what we need, even if it is not the drink we want.

Steve Raml
Director of Liturgy/Music