The Good Hunger

There is an ache, a longing, a void, which should be ever present in me, and which I all too often lose. If only I could always say, as Amon Wilder wrote in 'No Language But A Cry:

'I have a heart that cries to God
Abandonedly across the blind
Imperfect avenue of mind,
I have a heart that cries to God...

I have a heart that cries to God
Immediately and must dispense
With faltering through the world of sense,
And calls across the mind to God.'

But, instead, I have a heart that says "What should I cook for dinner tonight? Can the grocery budget be stretched any tighter? How many more phone calls need to be made? Which child was supposed to be on dish duty for lunch?..."
And when I'm not rushing around the house playing Martha, I too often throw myself into the garden, or an art project, or the center of a book. Some great, haunting, hardly definable question keeps rising in me, to be hastily pushed down. I told my mother last week: 'There are just some things I need time and space to think through', but this isn't really the issue. The problem is that there are things I'm using every available shred of time and space to AVOID thinking about.
And in all of that turmoil, where can God reign? Where is the good hunger, the crying out for Him?
Mercifully, after periods of terrible dryness, resentment, and confusion, He has restored it, but I still feel, many days, like I'm tiptoeing through a quagmire of impossible questions, and even more impossible answers.
I wrote this last night:

The Promise:

"You weep as one who had a right to weep.
So state your case."
'It is but this:
I cannot love Thee, Lover, as I would.'
He laughed then- such a laugh
Of sorrow and mirth- exulting tenderness-
"You weep for that?
Child dear, did you but love me as you can
You could not love.
Nor long to love at all!
But you do long-
You yearn, you ache to love.
Whence does that yearning spring,
If not from Me?
My daughter, if I have
Planted My love, and will to love in you,
Caused it to grow, tumultuous, in your heart
It is because I know
How to complete, perfect it,
And will bring
Our love to lovely flowering in My time
Until, as in Love's last extremity
I served my Father, and humanity,
You too shall love!"

It is a promise to hold to, even when this, written a little earlier, seems far more descriptive of my state:

'And Love- Torn, broken, bleeding Love
In me.
Has not that gushing wealth of blood
Has not the anguished hue of red
That was Thine own.
But is a sickly-pale, anaemic thing
Shrinking from all its wounds
Quaking with dim fears, with a horror of pain
Peculiar in a soul too craven, flaccid
To suffer mighty agonies at great events.
It is as though
They'd pierced my side- those haggard men with spears
Looming through lurid sunset, swirling fog-
And drawn forth not a rush of blood with water
But water, trick'ling, with a tinge of blood.'