Are You Thirsty?

I once knew a dear man who said that he was the brother of a saint.  Though I thought he was one of twelve children, he was actually one of thirteen children. It turns out that the youngest and thirteenth child died an hour or so after being born.  “He was a saint” said the dear man, “because he never sinned”.

       With all due respect to the man in question, I do not think that this qualified the child who died shortly after birth as a saint.  A saint is not defined as someone who never sinned, but as something else.

       His brother could, however, be accounted an “innocent”.  The babies two years of age and under who were slain in Bethlehem by King Herod in his attempt to slay the infant Christ Child are referred to as “Holy Innocents” in our Orthodox calendar which refers to the “14,000 Holy Innocents of Bethlehem”.  (The number of 14,000 is, of course, symbolic and not statistical; the Syrian calendar puts their number at 64,000.  The total population of the Bethlehem hamlet might have only been a few hundred and the number of babies two years old and under probably did not exceed a few dozen.) They were styled “Holy Innocents because they died (inadvertently) for the Lord.  In this sense all young babies are “innocents”, though this also does not count toward possible canonization.

       So then: what does qualify one as a saint?  What is a saint?

       The English word “saint” translates the Greek ἅγιος/ agios and the Hebrew qadosh, both meaning “holy” or “belonging to God” but that definition only begs the further question, “What does ‘belonging to God’ look like?”  It is an important question because all Christians are described by St. Paul as ἅγιος/ “saints” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 1:2, Ephesians 1:2) and so we need to know what kind of lives we should be living as saints, as those who belong to God.

       One component is that of devotion—Christians should be devoted to God.  And what does devotion look like?  Forgive a homely analogy, but I would suggest that to see true devotion, one might look at the devotion that a dog has for his master (and I say this as a “cat person” who has never owned a dog but has seen plenty of doggy devotion).

       The analogy, believe it or not, has an ecclesiastical pedigree (forgive the pun):  those in the Dominican order were sometimes referred to as the “hounds” or “dogs of Lord”.  It came, of course, from a play on words in the Latin: Dominicanus in Latin sounds a lot like “Domini canis”—i.e. the dogs of the Lord.  (One wonders in passing if the Scriptural dog found in Tobit 5:16 and 11:4—present as the non-human balance and foil for the non-human angel Raphael—had anything to do with it.) In a culture where dogs were used for hunting, perhaps the Dominican Order of Preachers were happy to be compared to such hunting dogs, taking down their heretical prey.

       But anyway, Dominicans or not, dogs are famous for their devotion for their masters, greeting them each day with enthusiastic barks and wagging tails, earning them the sobriquet “man’s best friend”.  Dogs live for their masters, with unflagging loyalty and love.  Such love can offer a reflection of the kind of unflagging devotion a saint has for his (or her) Lord.  Indeed, a proverbial dog name is “Fido” which means “faithful”.

       That said, sanctity involves more than simply the affection and faithfulness that dogs show for their masters.  It also involves being thirsty—an almost insatiable thirst for the divine presence.

       We see this thirst for the divine most clearly in the Psalter.  In Psalm 42 the psalmist says, “As a hart longs for flowing steams, so longs my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God! When shall I come and behold the face of God?”

In Psalm 63 the psalmist cries out over and over again, “O God, You are my God, I seek You, my soul thirsts for You; my flesh faints for You as in a dry and weary land where no water is! Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You!  In the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy!” 

In Psalm 84 this constant chorus is rejoined: “My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of Yahweh; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God!  For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness”.

This is, I suggest, the essence of the Psalter and in fact the essence of Orthodoxy and without this thirst no true spirituality can exist.  This divinely-given thirst which is part of the authentic human condition was presupposed by the Lord.  In His invitation to all to become His disciples He said, “If anyone thirst, let him come to Me and drink.  He who believes in Me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37-38).  To be truly human is to thirst for God, for reality, for a joy the world cannot afford and cannot give—the reality of Christ who alone can slake the thirst of the world.

A saint is someone who does not run from this inner thirst or try to satisfy it with futile substitutes but who comes to the Lord and drinks.  The saving and thirst-slaking water is, of course, the Holy Spirit—the reality which Christ bestows on His disciples. 

It is, sadly, easy to be merely religious and to refuse admit to one’s inner thirst.  We can try to slake our thirst (which remains in us whether we admit it or not) with other things:  money, sex, or fame.  We can bury ourselves in Netflix and entertain ourselves to death, trying with all our might to ignore the divine thirst within.  We can even substitute religion for reality, quoting the Bible, citing the Fathers, and arguing about Orthodoxy with complete strangers on Facebook to convince ourselves that all is well with our souls and we are not truly thirsty.  But this is not the path to sainthood.

A saint is someone who has come to terms with his or her inner thirst for the living God and who longs to linger in the courts of God, dwelling under the shelter of His wings. A saint is one who drinks every day at the eternal fountain.  And, as one writer has said, “The only real sadness, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint”.

We are all thirsty in the waterless desert that is planet earth.  God has opened up a living fountain in our midst.  Let us become saints.  Let us run to the living fountain each day and drink.