Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
As the Deer Longs for Streams of Water

As the Deer Longs for Streams of Water

Last updated on: June 22, 2025 at 6:00 am by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

As the Deer Longs for Streams of Water 2025-06-20T16:52:41-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Today’s lectionary readings contain two of my favorites, both from the Jewish scriptures. The story of Elijah running for his life from Jezebel is part of my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Phlosophy, as I posted late last summer.

Get Up and Eat

But today I focus on Psalm 46, which reminds me of a meaningful encounter with a deer while on retreat, as I described three years ago.

As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God Psalm 42:1

I met a deer the other morning, the first deer I’ve met in a long time. I was on my usual early morning bike ride (the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice these days), came down an unfamiliar hill in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and there he was standing in the middle of the road. I stopped far enough away to get my phone out of my pocket without scaring him and took a very amateurish picture—at least I got one. “Looking good, dude,” I said as he sauntered off into someone’s back yard. I don’t know a whole lot about deer, but I do know that deer with horns are dudes.

The hill and neighborhood where I met the deer are unfamiliar because I am away on retreat for three days. Jeanne started mentioning a couple of months ago that she thought I should find an appropriate location and go away on silent retreat for a few days. I’m not sure what prompted this suggestion. Maybe it was my wandering around the house aimlessly and sighing a lot. Maybe it was that although a silent retreat used to be a regular annual event for me, I had not been on one since pre-pandemic in 2019. Maybe it was that my June began with a serious bicycle crash and ended with a not-as-serious-but-very-annoying fender bender in the car.

I listened to her and ended up scheduling a silent retreat at St. Edmund’s Retreat Center on Enders Island in Connecticut, just an hour away from home. Even though I would only be on site for 72 hours, I packed so many books in my bookbag that it was heavier than I ever recall it being in the ten years or so that it has been my man purse. I had a specific reason for taking each book with me, except the last one. Five minutes before I left the house, I walked past the part of our library bookshelf where Barbara Brown Taylor’s books hang out. I grabbed An Altar in the World—a decision I regretted while unpacking my bag when I remembered that I had taken this very book with me on my last retreat three years ago. I even reposted an essay I wrote on that retreat inspired by a chapter in this book on this blog a couple of weeks ago.

Why Christians Should Care About Their Bodies

But as Big Bird would have it, An Altar in the World is exactly the book I needed to take with me. I know that I’ve read it carefully before because there is so much marking and underlining in it. But I’m three years older and a pandemic has happened since my first time through—this time it read as if it had been written precisely for me at this point in my life.

One of the things I expected to be thinking about and considering while on retreat was a couple of short academic essays that are due to the editor by September 1. I am one of three dozen contributors to the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil; I have been assigned two important topics in Weil’s work on which to write 3000-word essays for this handbook. One of these topics is “attention.” This should be an easy one.

I introduce students to Simone Weil through one of her seminal essays that develops an understanding of attention, the cultivated capacity to see the reality of things other than oneself and to engage with them without the distorting lenses and framework of the self. I’ve used this aspect of Weil in the classroom for twenty-five years, I frequently say that her meditations on attentiveness have changed my life, and I included an chapter on attention in my 2017 book Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World (shameless plug). My commissioned essay should write itself.

Chapter Two in An Altar in the World is “The Practice of Paying Attention”; Barbara Brown Taylor even discusses Simone Weil and attention in a couple of the chapter’s middle pages. Taylor introduces attentiveness through its related virtue, reverence. Reverence, as Taylor describes it, is the recognition that “it’s not all about me.”

The exercise of reverence generally includes knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things . . . Reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self—something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding.

Connecting reverence and attention makes sense, since both involve de-centering and a clear awareness of what is other than me. When Anne Lamott say that the best definition for “God” is “not me,” she’s plugging into the importance of reverence. Attentiveness becomes more possible if one is also cultivating the virtue of reverence. I even claimed that my New Year’s resolution a few years ago was to become a more reverent person (don’t ask).

Taylor ends her chapter on attention and reverence this way:

The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore. To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next.

I had made it almost all the way through the chapter nodding my head in agreement thinking “you’re right Barbara—you understand what attention is (and so do I).” But this final paragraph was a slap upside my head. Because “crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next” is pretty much how my life has been going for the last couple of months (and undoubtedly longer).

My days this summer have begun with walking Bovina for a mile, then taking my daily bike ride (20 miles is the goal). After returning home, my day is pretty much a matter of doing several things in a haphazard and half-assed way with little attentiveness and no reverence. At some point in the afternoon, I decide that it’s time for a beer or two. Cap it off with eating dinner and spending the evening in front of the television, then going to bed until the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat. Barbara Brown Taylor just nailed me to the wall—I am undoubtedly the least reverent and most inattentive person I know. It took me 36 hours of retreat silence to realize it.

In a late chapter in An Altar in the World, Taylor describes the reaction of her “Introduction to World Religions” students when, at a Hindu vespers service, everyone sat quietly in silence on cushions for close to an hour after a few opening verses.

[They were] startled to hear the sound of their own heartbeats for the first time. They had no idea there was so much space inside of them. No one ever taught them how to hold still long enough for the shy deer-soul inside of them to step into the clearing and speak.

The sad thing is that I do know about that space inside of me. I have met and embraced that “shy deer-soul,” and it changed my life. And at times I’ve incorporated it into my daily routine in fruitful and energizing ways. But not recently.

Maybe it is not “sad,” but simply “human” that it is so easy to allow that space to get crusted over with stuff. When I read Taylor’s description of the “shy deer-soul” twenty-four hours after I met the deer on my bike ride, I realized that the deer dude was a reminder. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you to hang out, be at peace, and get centered. You don’t have to go on retreat to find me. But I’m glad you did.”

The Lord’s acts of mercy indeed do not end, for His compassions do not fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. Lamentations 3: 22-23

Previous Post

June 19, 2025

There Is No One But Us

Next Post

June 24, 2025 Making Things Difficult

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz