The Hidden Spring

comments on Simply Christian by Tom Wright

I remember several years ago reading Eat, Pray, Love. The author, Elizabeth Gilbert, hungered for something beyond herself, a spirituality that would guide her, a centering force.  This hunger sent her on a quest across several countries.  She heard an audible voice at one point telling her, “You have no idea how much I love you.” I am not sure she found the speaker. Perhaps she is still searching.

Tom Wright talks about this modern day yearning for spirituality in his second chapter of Simply Christian. Our yearning, he says, is like a natural bubbling, spring that has been covered over with cement, the cement of the materialist philosophy of the last 200 years that bids us believe that our spiritual yearnings are daydreams, that God is a rumor, that religion is a private hobby (18).

But in the last three decades, bubbling springs of spirituality have come bursting forth through the cement of skepticism.  “Many people today hear the very word ‘spirituality’ like travelers in a desert hearing news of an oasis” (18).

The renewed interest in spirituality can be seen in the huge number of books that inundate our book stores, books for which a category isn’t clear–should we put that one under religion, self-help, spirituality? (22).

This awakening to spiritual things has taken people down many different roads:  the study of reincarnation, a crazed interest in personality testing, a focus on nature mysticism or getting in touch with the deep cycles of the world around us, a turning towards “a quasi-Buddhist detachment from the world” (22).

This spiritual ache has prompted people, like Elizabeth Gilbert, to do pilgrimages around the globe.  It has created huge curiosity in anything Celtic.  Perhaps in Celtic “music, prayers, buildings, jewelry,” we can find another world, a world where God, whoever he is, presents himself more clearly (23).

Tom Wright asks, “What makes us so thirsty?” Then he proposes the Christian explanation of the thirst– “in Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love” (24). He’s a God who is calling them to drink in springs of living water.

The widespread hunger for spirituality, he proposes, is a signpost to something more, an echo of a voice that beacons us from a distant land (27). Perhaps it is the same voice Elisabeth Gilbert heard. The one that said, “you have no idea how much I love you.” And so, the quest becomes a search to find the voice behind the loving words.