Thirsting and Quenching

Ignatius Insight Scoop has a link to the introduction to the book, "Prayer Primer: Igniting a Fire Within" by Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M. Here is just a portion:

Men and women everywhere are hungry and thirsty, voraciously yearning and seeking: rich and poor, wise and foolish, young and old, literate and illiterate, saints and sinners, atheists and agnostics, playboys and prostitutes. Some can explain their inner emptiness in words; most cannot, but everyone experiences it. That inner ache drives all our dreams, desires, and decisions--good and bad. Even your decision to pick up this book and read was triggered by this nameless desire.

Our abiding hunger for more than we presently experience does not have to be proved but only explained. Which is what we propose to do right now, before we even begin to think about what prayer is all about. Otherwise you and I cannot understand fully the splendid reality of communing deeply with our Creator and Lord and of our unspeakable destiny in and with him.

Mere animals do not and cannot have this inner aching need, for the simple reason that material things are satisfied with visible creation and their place in it. Because you and I have intellects and wills rooted in our profound spiritual core, nothing finite and limited does, or ever can, fill us. Deep in our humanness is an ache for fullness, for infinity. We are completely satisfied by no individual egoism, by no series of selfish pursuits: vanity, fame, money, lust, power, drugs. Always the sinner seeks more accolades, more money, more recognition, more lewd eroticism, more control of others, more drugs. Never is he satisfied, never really happy and fulfilled.

Why is this so? As spirit-in-the-flesh beings, you and I burst beyond the material order, beyond what our senses can attain, beyond the cosmos itself. By its limited nature nothing created can satisfy us. God alone, the sole infinite One, can fill our endless yearnings. As Karl Rahner put it, we are oriented by nature to the Absolute. Or as John Courtney Murray expressed it, the problem now is not how to be a man, but how to become more than a man. Or as St. Augustine put it in his classic prayer: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Kittens and giraffes do not have this problem. They cannot. You and I do. (See CCC 27-30.)

This seems to be a wonderful book to read for Lent!