The "Sketch" of God's Heart on your Soul

Have you ever missed someone so deeply that it became a physical ache? Not just a passing thought or a wistful moment, but something that settled into your chest like a weight, something that disrupted your sleep and stole your appetite? Perhaps it was a spouse deployed overseas, a child who moved far away, or a dear friend separated from you by circumstances beyond your control. You know the feeling. It is not merely sadness. It is a longing so fierce that it reshapes you from the inside out. You find yourself unable to concentrate, unable to settle, unable to be satisfied by anything else because the one thing you want most is the one thing you do not yet have.

Most of us try to cure that kind of ache as quickly as possible. We distract ourselves. We fill the silence with noise. We keep busy. We treat longing as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heeded.

But what if the ache itself were doing something essential? What if the longing were not a malfunction of the heart but its deepest and most important work?

St. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century mystic and poet (who I quote so frequently many of you are probably tired of it, but he's one of my favorites), wrote words that stopped me in my tracks this morning:

"It should be known that love never reaches perfection until the lovers are so alike that one is transfigured into the other. And then the love is in full health. The soul experiences within herself a certain sketch of love, which is the sickness he mentions, and she desires the completion of the sketch of this image, the image of her Beloved, the Word, the Son of God, who as St. Paul says, is the splendor of his glory and the image of his substance (Heb. 1:3)." (The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 11, no. 12)

Love, he says, never reaches perfection until the lovers are so alike that one is transfigured into the other. And until that transformation is complete, what the soul carries within her is not yet the fullness of love but "a certain sketch of love."

That sketch, that incomplete image, is what he calls sickness.

Not sickness as punishment. Not sickness as failure. Sickness as the soul's acute awareness that she is not yet what she is becoming.

This is a breathtaking reframing of the spiritual life. Most of us assume that if we are doing things right, we should feel well, feel whole, feel at peace.

And there is a deep peace that does characterize the life lived with God.

But John of the Cross insists that there is also a holy restlessness, a sacred dissatisfaction, that belongs not to those who are far from God but to those who are drawing near. The closer you come, the more you feel the distance that remains. The brighter the light, the more visible the shadow.

 

The Sketch and the Image

Think about what it means to call love "a sketch." An artist begins with preliminary lines, rough shapes, the faintest suggestion of what the finished work will be. If you walked into a studio and saw only the sketch, you might not recognize what the artist intends. But the artist knows. Every tentative mark on the canvas is oriented toward a completed vision.

St. John of the Cross tells us that within the soul there exists a sketch of love, and that this sketch longs for its own completion. The finished image toward which it strains is nothing less than "the image of her Beloved, the Word, the Son of God."

The soul is being drawn into resemblance with Christ himself.

This is not metaphor piled on metaphor for poetic effect. This is the heart of the gospel.

Paul writes to the Corinthians, "And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18, NRSV). Notice the language: being transformed into the same image. This is not something we accomplish. It is something that is happening to us, worked by the Spirit, as we behold the glory of God.

We are sketches in the process of becoming portraits.

And to the Romans, Paul makes the same point with even greater force: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family" (Romans 8:29).

The destiny of the human soul is conformity to Christ.

We are made to bear his likeness, not in some external or superficial way, but in the deepest structure of our being.

Love, as John of the Cross understood, is the very means of this transformation. When love reaches its perfection, the lovers become so alike that one is transfigured into the other. This is not the erasure of the self but its fulfillment.

The soul does not disappear into God; she becomes most fully herself precisely in becoming most like him.

 

Why the Sickness Matters

But we are not there yet. And this is where John's language of sickness becomes so pastorally important.

If you have ever felt a deep, unnameable hunger in prayer, a sense that God is both nearer than your own breath and somehow impossibly distant, you have felt what John is describing. If you have tasted just enough of God's goodness to be ruined for lesser satisfactions, if worship sometimes leaves you more aching than when you arrived, if reading Scripture occasionally opens a wound of longing that nothing in this world can close, then you know this sickness.

If you've ever been hurt by someone, even someone in church (who may or may not have intended to wound you), you recognize that something within you remains incomplete. We have extremely vulnerable souls, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise.

For me, I have a lot of wounds related to rejection. I'm not going to go into that. But it's often staggering how the slightest slight can open those wounds for me.

And the temptation is to think something has gone wrong.

It has not. Something has gone profoundly right. The sketch is becoming aware of itself. The unfinished image within you is straining toward completion. You are feeling the gap between what you already are by grace and what you are not yet in glory. That gap is not a sign of God's absence. It is the surest evidence of his presence, because only someone who has begun to see the Beloved could ache so fiercely for the fullness of his face.

When I feel that pain, when I realize my "sketch" is incomplete, I like to contemplate an image of the crucifix, of Christ's suffering. And the more intense, the more realistic, the more "grotesque" even, the better. Here's why.

None of my wounds even compare to the wounds He suffered. He was rejected far more painfully than anyone has ever rejected me. His physical wounds are an outward and embodied reflection of a pain that was even greater he experienced through betrayal, rejection, and mockery.

But I also know His wounds were glorified in the resurrection. If his wounds, as grotesque as they might appear in some artwork, can be glorified and perfected... my lesser wounds will certainly share in the same glory, provided I allow my wounds to be united to His. His image of suffering, and also in glory, is the completion of the sketch that has been started in my soul, that God is still finishing as He unites me more and more to the image of His Son.

The psalmist knew this longing: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Psalm 42:1–2). Notice that the psalmist does not say, "My soul thirsts for answers" or "My soul thirsts for comfort." The thirst is for God himself. For his face. For unmediated presence. And until that presence is fully given, the thirst remains, and the thirst is a kind of suffering, and the suffering is a kind of love.

 

Love as Transfiguration

John of the Cross anchors his reflection in the Letter to the Hebrews, where the Son is described as "the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being" (Hebrews 1:3). The Greek word translated "exact imprint" is charaktēr, from which we get the English word "character." It refers to the precise impression a seal makes in wax, the exact reproduction of an original. The Son is the perfect image of the Father. And the soul, drawn by love, is being pressed into that same mold.

This is what transfiguration means.

It is not self-improvement. It is not moral effort, though moral effort has its place.

It is the slow, often painful, always grace-driven process by which the soul is remade in the likeness of the One she loves. And this process requires that the soul remain in the tension of incompleteness. It requires that she not flee from the ache but dwell within it, allowing the longing itself to do its transforming work.

Think of it this way. A lump of clay on a potter's wheel is not yet a vessel. But it is also not nothing. It is something in between, something being shaped by hands that know what it will become even when the clay does not. The pressure of those hands might feel like suffering. The spinning might feel disorienting. But every moment of the process is purposeful. Every turn of the wheel brings the clay closer to its intended form.

 

Living with the Sketch

So what do we do with this? How do we live as unfinished sketches?

First, stop diagnosing your longing for God as a spiritual problem. It is not a problem. It is the most honest thing about you. When you feel restless in prayer, when you sense that your love for God is small and inadequate, when you ache for something you cannot name, when someone does or says something that opens up old wounds in your soul, that exposes your sickness, receive that ache as a gift. It means the Artist is at work. The sketch is being drawn toward completion.

Second, resist the impulse to fill the ache with substitutes. Our culture offers a thousand anesthetics for the soul's deepest hunger. But none of them satisfy, because none of them are what the soul actually wants. Let the longing stand. Let it breathe. Let it do its work in you.

Third, return again and again to beholding. Paul said we are transformed by seeing the glory of the Lord. This means that the primary task of the spiritual life is not effort but attention. Read Scripture not merely for information but for encounter. Pray not merely to get things from God but to be with God. Sit in silence, even when the silence aches, because the silence is where the sketch is being completed, one imperceptible stroke at a time.

Finally, trust the Beloved. The image toward which you are being drawn is not an abstraction. It is a person. It is the Word made flesh, the Son who is the exact imprint of the Father's being. He knows what you are becoming even when you do not. And the sickness of love that you carry within you is not a sign that you are far from health. It is a sign that health, full and glorious and beyond anything you can presently imagine, is on its way.

The sketch will be completed. Love will reach its perfection. And on that day, the sickness will give way to a wholeness so total that you will look back on your deepest longing and recognize it for what it always was: the first faint brushstroke of an eternal masterpiece.

 

God Bless,

Judah