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Seven

“I Thirst”:

A Window on the Heart of God

The Good News Retold

Who of us would not have been overwhelmed by such an experience as Mother Teresa had on that September day in 1946 — having encountered a God who not only accepts us, but who actually longs for us, even as we sleep, and even when we wander.

Mother Teresa encountered a God who yearns for us — exactly as we are, even the worst among us; a God who wishes to draw us into his embrace, regardless of past failings or present weakness. She came to understand a cornerstone of God’s mercies, of his way of dealing with us, in realizing that we each need more love than we deserve.²⁴ Has God not indeed shown us his greatest love precisely when we deserved it least, from the tree of Eden to the tree of Calvary, and beyond?

But lest we make the mistake of seeing God’s unconditional longing as a license for laxity or complacency, there is another corollary key to Mother Teresa’s understanding of God’s plan. His longing for us is not the end of the story. The same God who loves us as we are also loves us too much to leave us as we are. This is why he urged Mother Teresa to labor not only for the salvation of the poor, but for their full sanctification — that is, for their complete transformation; for nothing less than the fullness of their potential and dignity in God. Salvation is the beginning, but there is always more this side of heaven, and God’s thirst for us will always draw us on to a still deeper union with him. Rather than being the domain of the few, holiness — the free gift of ultimate transformation worked by divine love, and the final goal of the divine thirst — is open to one and all. In fact, the needier we are, and the farther away, the more God strives to draw us into his kingdom, where the “first will be last, and the last first” (Mk 10:31).

The Good News of the gospel is laced throughout Mother Teresa’s message — tidings that may seem radically new, unheard of, hard to believe, especially for those who have yet to personally encounter God’s love. Her message may indeed be radical, but it is far from new. The mystery of the divine longing has always been there, hidden in the books of the Old Testament, and woven throughout every page of the New.

If this is so, then why have we not heard it before? Perhaps because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God’s self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty and conditional kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness.

But the true God, the living God, is entirely “other.” Precisely from this radical otherness derives the inscrutable and transcendent nature of divine love — for which our limited human love is but a distant metaphor. God’s love is much more than our human love simply multiplied and expanded. God’s love for us will ever be mystery: unfathomable, awesome, entirely beyond human expectation.

Precisely because God’s love is something “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Cor 2:9), Mother Teresa meditated on it continuously, and encouraged us to do the same, to continue plumbing this mystery more deeply. To this end she invites us: “Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, ‘Thirst of God.’ ”²⁵

Seeing Through Her Eyes

If we accept Mother Teresa’s invitation to contemplate the same light she beheld on the train, we need to try to see that light, first of all, through her eyes, through the lens of her own soul, before making that light our own. And so our first step on our journey into the light is to ask what the mystery of Jesus’ thirst meant to her. What is there about God that Mother Teresa came to know and experience, but that (perhaps) eludes us still? What divine depths still await us, unknown, beckoning us into God’s embrace?

Let us begin to answer these questions by exploring some of Mother Teresa’s insights into the divine thirst.

First of all, what does the thirst of Jesus tell us about God? The symbol of thirst is neither complicated nor hard to understand: As the burning desert yearns for water, so God yearns for our love. As a thirsty man longs for water, so God longs for each of us. As a thirsty man seeks after water, so God seeks after us. As a thirsty man thinks only of water, so God thinks constantly of us: “Even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Lk 12:7). As a thirsty man will give anything in exchange for water, so God gladly gives all he has, and all he is, in exchange for us: his divinity for our humanity, his holiness for our sin, his paradise in exchange for our pain.

For Mother Teresa, the mystery of God’s thirst, revealed in Jesus, is at the center of all, and the key to all. God’s yearning to “love and be loved” is the supreme force that inspires and directs all his works, from Creation, to Calvary, to the present day.

Jesus’ words “I thirst” echo down throughout history. In these two words are reflected all that God has said and done from the beginning, and all he would wish to say to each of us. All of God’s words to humanity are a reverberation of this one humble phrase. In fact, all of Scripture is a commentary on the divine thirst, and in turn, the divine thirst sheds light on all of Scripture, on all of Revelation, on all that is.

Why the Symbol of Thirst?

Since it would be impossible to give an adequate sense of the infinite longing in the heart of God in mere words, or theological descriptions, God chose to communicate this mystery in metaphor — that of a burning, relentless, divine “thirst.”

Mother Teresa was given a symbol to lift up before the poor that was entirely simple, yet many-faceted; simple enough to touch the hearts of the poor, yet deep enough to engage the intellect of scholars. The Holy Spirit portrays God’s longing in the most accessible language possible — that of human experience.

As descendants of a nomadic desert people, constantly in search of water, the Israelites of Jesus’ time would have easily understood thirst as metaphor. So, too, would the poor of Calcutta, who had to scavenge for every drop of clean water they could find. Thirst is a metaphor that does not depend on culture, nor on erudition; a language capable of expressing the deepest truths without relying on technical, theological terms, nor on expressions that change from one era to the next, but solely on the universal human experience of thirst, and its attendant inner longing.