Lectio
“The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.”
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, from Through the Year with Thomas Merton
Meditatio
We are bombarded by distractions at every turn, and, what’s worse, we actually seek them out to the point where silence or stillness feels not only awkward, but altogether intolerable. We fill every moment with sights and sounds and stimulation, and then we wonder why, having built our lives around restlessness and dis-ease, we are so restless and dis-eased.
But this is not as God intended in the beginning. In the Garden, He provided us with everything, and we wanted more. He gave us the world, each other, and Himself, and yet we wanted more. And this desire for more, our insatiable desire for something other than what we have, to be someone other than who we are, and to be somewhere other than in this place and in this moment keeps us in a perpetual state of flight from God and all that He provides — reaching for the fruit of dissatisfaction when all He wants to give us is everything we will ever want or need, which is Him.
This wanting of more, ultimately, then, becomes a wanting of less. Because God is the source of all that is good, fulfilling, and rewarding, desiring that which is other than what God desires to give us is settling for less than that which is holy, that which is eternal, and that which is love. In this way, all of the distractions we choose over the abundance He already provides, rather than adding value, depth, and meaning to our existence, actually make our lives less rich, more shallow, and less meaningful.
When we distract ourselves in order to self-soothe, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to be comforted by God. We rob ourselves of the opportunity to rely on Him. And we rob ourselves of the opportunity to get to know Him in our need, in our vulnerability, and in our weakness, which is exactly where He most desires to find us because, in our nothingness without God, God reveals Himself to us abundantly as both the source and satisfaction of our deepest longing of which our petty distractions are only a vain attempt to find Him in all that is not Him. And so God waits for us to receive His grace, which pours out into us as the very gift of Godself within us, to put down the false gods that cause our suffering, that exacerbate our neurosis, and to recognize Him as the one true God of our lives so that He, alone, may provide what we need.
Oratio
Simply Love
I have used my freedom
to flee from You
my God
to fill my hours
with false idols
worldly masters
foreign gods
rejecting Your promise
denying Your abundance
rebelling against Your will
which is simply love
simply that I love
simply that I receive Your love
even this freedom
is from You
who loves me
Contemplatio
You were made for more than you have been settling for. Let that truth land gently, not as accusation but as invitation — the false gods you’ve carried were always going to leave you empty, because they were never Him. He does not ask you to fix yourself before He comes near; He asks only that you stop running. Stay in the quiet with this, saying yes to whatever He wants to stir in you.
Related Scripture
“for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”
— Jeremiah 2:13 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Sold Short By a Hundredfold: Abba Nilus and the Wisdom of Wanting What God Wills, which meets this same restlessness from another angle — not the flight from God through distraction, but the quieter surrender of wanting what He wills instead of what we think we want.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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