Come As You Are

 

Ho! Everyone who thirsts,

      Come to the waters:

And you who have no money,

      Come buy and eat.

Yes, come, buy wine and milk

      Without money and without price.   - Isaiah 55:1

            The only requisite for drinking at the wellspring of salvation is thirst.  We have no coin of our own, no works, no penitence, no disciplines, no righteousness, no attributes, and no credits of any kind that will purchase the deep draught of the water of Life.  Come as you are, come in your poverty, come in your grief, come in your abject helplessness and drink freely of the living water.  He did not come for the spiritually affluent but for those who are thirsty.

            Ah!  There lies the rub.  Have you discovered your need?  Do you think you can buy this lively water with your own coin?  He has said that, “No one is justified by the law in the sight of God” (Gal. 3:11).  The only coin you need is deep thirst.  Come as you are to the banquet table of the Presence of God.  Bow humbly and drink.

            Our human condition is such that too often our need, our very thirst itself, is so sharp that it becomes all consuming and drives out the very the thing we need most.  We are filled with grief, filled with self-pity, filled with a sense of inadequacy, filled with helplessness and instead of turning outward to Him we turn inward and become focused on the causes of our thirst. 

The antidote is to surrender our human pain and frustration and begin to acknowledge that He who became one of us, did so because He loves us even when we cannot love ourselves.  This has less to do with emotion than with decision.  The simple acknowledgement that I am loved by the lover of my soul, whether or not I feel it, is the beginning of a step through our difficulties into His Presence.  The decision to accept that love is prior to the feeling that comes from living within that decision.  That decision to accept Divine love is a hinge that swings the door of our soul outward from introspective preoccupation with the causes of our thirst and outward into the light.  Drinking at the well is not a passive experience, but an active and ongoing reception of the love that is offered. It is an old mystical perception that in the desire is the fulfillment.  We must first allow ourselves to desire in order that we may be filled.

            It is not that we should avoid the knowledge of our pain.  What I said was that the acknowledgement that we are loved is a step “through” our difficulties.  We are to come as we are.  We can come no other way.  That acknowledgement of our realities makes possible the surrender of our pain to Him who alone can heal and deliver.  You cannot surrender what you do not acknowledge.  You cannot surrender that which you will not release.  Once you have acknowledged that you are loved, once you have acknowledged your pains and lifted them up in surrender you are already beginning to drink.   

Ho! Everyone who thirsts,

            Come to the waters:

And you who have no money,

            Come buy and eat.

Yes, come, buy wine and milk

Without money and without price.     - Isaiah 55:1