The Great Longing

If you’ve lived long enough, you can recognize that persistent longing in your heart.

The one that is almost never satiated.

Like something is always just out of reach; that we’re never quite where we want to be.

New Age and Self-Help tenants would tell us to ‘find our path’ and ‘fulfill our dreams’ and then things will surely settle down.

We’re told again and again to ‘find ourselves.’

But have you noticed that this doesn’t actually work? Yes, we may have incredible ‘A-HA!’ moments and we may crack some interior codes, but none of this actually delivers us from that near constant longing in our hearts.

Hence, the longing remains.

Saint Augustine said that sin is to be ‘incurvatos in se’….meaning, to be caved in around oneself.

Isn’t that interesting? Everything that our New Age, secular world tells us will deliver us from despair and into happiness - finding our own path, defining our own terms of reality and relating, and asserting our own will - is actually the opposite of personal salvation.

There is an incredible passage from Ephesians 3:20 in biblical scripture that says: Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.

The great philosopher Soren Kierkegaard sums this relational conundrum up so beautifully. He says that we did not cause or create ourselves.

We are brought into being and sustained in existence by something other than ourselves. He believes that something is God.

He writes about reaching across the abyss to God in order to alleviate our own despair; that, in fact, that is the only recourse that we have.

This great longing that we all have is the ultimate invitation.

If everything in this known world has been constituted or created by God…it cannot BE God.

Why then, would we go to IT to quell our longing? To heal our hearts? To alleviate our despair?

When this is really, really seen, it no longer makes any sense.

How you reach across the abyss to God is between you and God. But if you don’t ask…inquire…commune WITH God on this existential question, you will continue to wander.

Last fall, when I dared to reach across the abyss (or perhaps it was God reaching across to me) I couldn’t have predicted, in a million years, where it has since taken me.

On my own, I could not have ushered my life, my relationships, my embodiment, my path…into the spaces that it has since been ushered into.

I could no more have done that of my own will or volition precisely because I was completely caved in on myself. I was ‘incurvatos in se.’

In other words, I had limited myself to myself. I had become small.

It’s a mistake we all make because we’re taught, at every turn, to make it.

However you conceive of The Highest, find your way back to it. It is the central calling of your Life.

It is the only salve to the longing in your heart.