Holy Longing

“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” ~ St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 400 AD

The most obvious evidence for God is the innate desire every person has since birth for connection. Fear of abandonment is universal. Who among us has not at one time or another experienced the terror of losing sight of their parents in a crowded place? Germaine to the human experience is an existential need to feel connected to something or someone outside of ourselves. Even the most introverted “lone wolf” type of person needs to feel connected to the world through certain activities such as reading, gardening, or even gaming.

In ancient cultures as well as modern, humans have always prioritized ways to gather publicly, to collaborate, communicate, bond, and organize in ways that satisfy the need for connection and as a means to thrive and survive. In the postmodern era, this need for connecting is evident in literally every stage and aspect of life. For young people, there’s preschool playdates and required schooling through the age of eighteen. Adults work together, engage in civic matters, social matters, and religious worship throughout young and late-adulthood. As we reach our senior years, we move into communities with other seniors. Think about the systematic way we connect throughout the seasons. In the fall we gather and organize around fall sports, fall foods, and fall festivals, followed by sporting events and holidays specific to winter, then spring, and summer. Families celebrate and connect through birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, reunions, and funerals. Churches organize trips, missions, Bible studies, and community outreach. The list goes on. Examples of how humans organize and transcend their isolation can be found as far back as aboriginal cultures, across all continents, and in every epoch since the beginning of human existence. All of these opportunities for gathering and connection are ways we humans break away from our sense of isolation. This is the human condition: It will always be the case that we need to transcend our bodily limitations and build social connections. This impulse is fundamentally spiritual and reflects our longing for something we can’t really name or claim, left to our own devices.

Nowhere is this restless impulse to connect outside of ourselves more evident than in young adolescents as their need for parental approval is replaced by a search for validation and belonging from their peers. In fact, the unbridled and restless desires of youth are the first real indication that at some deep level, we know we do not belong to our parents, but instead are God’s children, finally awake and searching for our home. The cocoon inside our family of origin is not enough to satisfy the unnamed inner longing that resides at a gut level. We start taking risks to find a deeper connection to satisfy something deep in our hearts and souls. Coming-of-age literature and movies exist as a cultural homage to this critical stage of emerging self-awareness (and “other-awareness”). With hormones raging, the adolescent need to break the mold and experience something new dominates and fascinates their attention during these years.

Eventually, early adulthood sets in with a few short lived victories and unanticipated disappointments inherent in every human life. Mid to late adulthood is when we realize that those restless desires will always be stronger than the satisfaction available on this side of existence. We set a goal, we meet a goal, but the satisfaction eventually fades and is replaced once again by that longing. We realize that in spite of our best efforts and planning, life often throws us curves that we have no power over. We are forced to face the reality that something bigger is at play and our efforts have little impact on this bigger something.

Yet, the unsatisfied longing stays there in our gut. We try to satisfy it in a myriad of ways, such as feeling good through alcohol, social events, fitness, career success, sex, our children’s accomplishments, or accumulating things. They satisfy for a while—sometimes for a long time before we sense something is still missing. There is only one thing that can finally satisfy that longing, and that something is actually a someone, our Creator. Until we recognize that we come into this world alone and leave this world alone, and that the deepest longing that plagues us is for our Creator, then that inner longing will agitate us like an unwelcome houseguest.

The unnamed longing residing deep in our core (from our childhood fear of abandonment through the adolescent need for peer acceptance and novel, exciting experiences, and finally through adulthood) is what Fr. Ron Rolheiser describes and discusses at length in a book that greatly influenced me in early adulthood, titled, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality.

The prospect of living with an unquenchable longing sounds like a lonely predetermined fate. However, what begins as a restless search for connection with anyone and everyone must finally evolve into a familiar and comforting solitude. Such solace is at the heart of a mature Christian spirituality. It is a welcome salve to the soul. It takes a spiritually mature person to finally be at peace with not knowing everything there is to know about God. There’s a holy resignation once we realize that the only thing we have when graced with His felt presence is to praise His holy name; to admit that our most ardent and scholarly attempts at understanding Scripture are crumbs, and that none of the questions we spend time arguing about with other Christians will even matter when we finally return home to God.

The well known verse from Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God” is not an invitation to relax, but a command to stop striving. God is telling us to stop trying to “will” Him into existence as a projection of our own fantasies and desires. Willpower and personal effort are vain attempts at feeling in command of our fates—they are an expression of our need to summon some transcendent experience outside of ourselves. Our efforts will never command God’s presence in the face of our daily battles. God does not respond to our commands! Our efforts are merely a sign of our desperate need for transcendence—for a felt sense of God’s presence. “The one who fears has not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:18-20). Sometimes we are gifted with a felt presence and other times we are left with the familiar longing. In either case, our frenetic attempts at satisfying the native longing is simply the unacknowledged love of our Father and Creator. I must stop striving and learn to rest in the Holy Longing.

More explicitly stated, our desire for God is nothing less than His personal signature on our nature as created beings. Like a work of art seeking to understand its master artist who brought it into being, humans have a deeply religious impulse to understand, express, and test our innermost intuitions about who we are and where we come from. A painting is an expression from the artist. It has no identity apart from the artist who created it, from concept to creation. As children of God, our only identity can be found in God who conceived of us in His mind first, before we existed in material being as a unified body and soul.

As a result of our fallen nature, though, we’re born with a compromised perspective of who we are. We don’t first see ourselves or our identity as an image of He who created us, rather we first believe ourselves to be a product of our parents, where we absorb their sins and broken perspectives. We come into existence with a natural propensity to serve the self first, then only later do we reflect on who this self really is. What is adolescence and young adulthood if not the most obnoxious and awkward attempt at defining ourselves in our own vain and delusional terms? Yet, eventually, living from our own desires and impulses leaves us feeling empty. As the saying goes, “it’s a fun place to visit (sometimes), but I don’t want to live there.”

We enter the world with a muted sense of knowing we belong elsewhere, but over time that knowing gets stronger and more influential over our behaviors and decisions, for better or for worse. Each of us eventually embarks on the journey to find our master Creator in order to know Him and return to Him. This is the religious impulse intrinsic to the human experience. Our religious impulse is that holy longing to worship, to know, to share, and to rejoice in our identity as it is known and loved by God.

If you are the rare person who doesn’t believe you have a religion or religious impulse, just look at how you spend your time, what preoccupies your thoughts, and to what end you spend most of your effort, for there is where your religion lurks. How do you attempt to soothe yourself, reassure yourself, express yourself? Those habits are clues to your self-idealized worship experience. None of us gets it right—we all replace God’s glory from time to time with our own conceits. Our fallen nature will always predictably attempt to recreate God in our own image, according to our preferences. In each and every case, our constructions of God will fail us. How many times have you said these things or heard others say them?

• “Nature is my church.”

• “I don’t need to be judged by a bunch of strangers.”

• “Churches are just full of hypocrites.”

• “I worship God in my own way.”

These are expressions of our innate fallen nature, a unique blend of narcissism and self-deceit. Here are my answers to these common sentiments:

• Nature does not exist for us to worship. It points to a Creator who alone deserves worship.

• While I may not like feeling judged, the fact is I permit myself the right to judge others all the time. The best cure for that is getting to know the people who you feel are judging you—it’s quite likely they have not thought at all about you. Most of us are a messy band of misfits and miscreants in dire need of love and forgiveness—and the well kept secret is that deep inside, we all know this.

• Yes, churches and, indeed the world, are full of hypocrites. Look in the mirror. Aren’t we all blind to our own sins? A community of other believers is my best hope on this side of eternity for shedding my hypocrisy and developing a holy humility.

• Finally, worship is not about you.

The blueprint for this distorted perspective of what God wants, who we are, and what others want from us is a recurring motif in Genesis, from the beginning to the end. God’s Word gives us everything we need to understand the depraved human heart as well as the heroic righteousness we are all capable of.

Eve is convinced of her own ability to determine right from wrong, apart from God’s specific instructions. She engages in typical human rationalization: “For she saw the fruit was pleasing to the eye and good for eating.” She attempted to satisfy her holy longing in her own way. Who cares what God wants? Don’t judge me! I’ve always understood the significance of this story, but only recently in life have I come to see that baptism, being born again, or even just doing good things in life will never completely heal this flawed thinking that I have in my nature. It is this original fallen state of our nature, the same one that Eve wrestled with, that plagues us at every instance of our lives. This fallen nature is how I know that deep down “I am not enough. I did not create myself. I am created for something other than myself.” It’s at the heart of C.S. Lewis’ famous quote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Original sin is more than just a tendency towards flawed thinking and acting. It doesn’t go away when we are saved. It is always there. Recognizing my need for God’s grace is a permanent condition, not a momentary realization that leads to a decision for salvation. Hence, my attitudes toward others, towards God Himself, and my worship of Him are flawed and stubbornly self-serving. Unless I commit to studying His Word and taking this journey with others who seek to know Him and love Him as well, I am in the exact same situation that Adam and Eve were when they attempted to hide from God, after their sin of disobedience.

I came to the Calvinist perspective of salvation after reflecting on this dynamic later in my life. No matter how sincere or devout I have been in my life of faith in Christ, no matter my efforts at worship, at learning God’s Word, at living God’s Word, or at evangelizing, the chasm between His perfection and my diseased will is always present. This is the Calvinist doctrine known as Total Depravity. I used to cringe when I heard people express it and I scorned it as a type of false humility from self-flagellating and pathological Christians who couldn’t accept the Good News. Now I see it as a necessary precursor to accepting the Good News. It is at the heart of Jesus’ ironic words in Matthew 5:31-32: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Who needs Jesus? Sinners. Who doesn’t need Jesus? The righteous. Who among us is righteous of his own accord? None of us. Indeed, we are all sinners and are all in need of saving. All Christians believe that part, but Calvin rejected the idea that as we practice virtue more and reject sin more, we eventually can become highly sanctified, to the point of near perfection. That was what I believed as a Methodist and as a Catholic. Now I have come to believe what a much admired preacher, Josh White (for Door of Hope Church in Portland, Oregon) often states: “Even when we are at our very best, we’re still a mixture.” God fills in the rest and multiplies our paltry offerings.

Essentially, we come into the world as orphans. The very best scenario, but far too rare in our world of seven + billion, is to be born to loving parents, committed to the gospel and to family life. The natural family is God’s blueprint for us to study and find our way to Him. Yet, even children born into the best circumstances often wander away from home, distracted and oblivious to what propels their desires and impulses. Even the most loving parents are marred by sin and woundedness that disappoint and mislead their children. It takes a miracle of rebirth to flood the stormy soul with correctly ordered desires that lead one back to God. It takes the epic supernatural intervention of the Creator of the Universe to heal the orphan’s native longing. This is what we have come to know as salvation, though it sounds so pedestrian; so provincial in its modern use. It is a supernatural miracle and it is the only thing that satisfies the longing soul. God offers this through His Son, our brother. The only perfect family is God’s family.

Many speak of the day, the hour they were saved. Some stories of salvation are dramatic and some read like a gentle glimmer of holy knowing that evolves over time. In either scenario, the holy knowing usually grows slowly into peaceful daily submission as long as the orphan has managed to let go of the need to “master” the gospel, as though it were his own solo performance. It is the journey that every single human soul must undergo to find his or her primordial home with God. The hero’s journey motif that we find in much of ancient and modern literature can often be seen as a metaphor for man searching for his original home, his Creator, her Savior.

One might first think of it as loneliness, but eventually the search for God’s presence becomes a familiar and comforting solitude. In my teens and twenties, I was hyper in everything I did. I pushed the limits of all kinds of unchaste and irresponsible behaviors. I can’t count how many times I’ve praised and thanked God for preserving me from the many possible consequences that I deserved for my selfish and destructive behaviors. The path that could have taken over my life is never far from my conscience. Forgiven through the mercy and blood of Christ, yes, but the compunction I feel in my heart when I look back at the wild, young version of myself is like a ghost of times past. It never lurks far from my memory, reminding me how much I need the Living God, lest I ever fall under the delusion that I am my own.

The history of humankind testifies to the congenital error of the human heart; that is, our innate ability to rationalize our selfish intentions and mold them to suit a false god created in our own depraved image. How often have you heard yourself think or express these thoughts?

I am basically a good person. (Jesus said, “Nobody is good except God.”)

It’s better to do behavior A than it is succumb to behavior B. (Jesus said: Be you holy as your Father in heaven is holy.”)

I’m sure God understands—I don’t need to worry about that. (Paul said: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.”)

I know that I am guilty of using these rationalizations on a regular, if not daily, basis. I now understand that the desires born out of my impulsive appetites were simply the darkened, unsanctified impulses masking and binding the loneliness that plagued me; indeed, the loneliness that every human being feels on a gut level. The behaviors masked a soul that was screaming to be heard, demanding to be known, and hoping to feel loved in the most primal and chaotic manner. It speaks to what many describe as the “God-shaped hole in our hearts.” This was me in my 20s. Maybe it is you now, or it was you at one time as well.

Up until my late 20s, my salvation lived as a concept in my head, but had not yet reached beyond the intellect. I loved the idea of my savior, I was confident in its truth, and I had a great desire to be that kind of person. The gap between my understanding and my ability to actualize that redeemed person was as wide as hell itself. My will was petulant and stubborn; it was still chained to my pride and conceit. Do I sound harsh and uncompromising? If so, it’s because the older I get, the more aware I am of how far from God I am. Some people grow up exposed to “hellfire and damnation” sermons and spend their adulthoods struggling to accept God’s abundant love and mercy. My parents were raised in the fire and brimstone of country church preaching. As a result, I was raised in a somewhat liberal household, where the few times we went to church, sermons were focused entirely on the love and forgiveness of God and not the sin of humanity. My young to middle adulthood was spent “testing” God’s mercy with a haughty and entitled attitude, though I didn’t it that way, of course. I made the mistake of accepting God’s ocean of mercy as though I deserved it. As a result, I held nothing back and approached life as though “all is fair” in love and war. I saw everything before me as something to be acquired, accomplished, tested, or dominated. The only time I found myself speechless was when I was in the presence of a devout, humble Christian. As I’ve mentioned, I believed myself to be a Christian and wanted to study Christianity at the seminary level, but the contrast was clear to me when I encountered the gentle and humble nature of devout Catholics and Protestants who seemed to understand the gospel on a deeper, more personal level than I did. I was awash in a libertine view God’s love—like a child who knows her parents will come to her rescue, no matter how reckless she behaves.

In college I remember dating a Christian young man. He was kind and gentle, and was clearly saving himself for marriage. I felt unworthy of him and remember trying really hard to match his countenance— to be “that kind of girl;” the kind of girl that was gentle, unassuming, and feminine. He was very interested in my intellect and he was attracted to me. Yet, he was restrained in a way that was foreign to me. I was assertive, opinionated, and had a compulsive need for intense engagement. I felt like a Viking warrior on the arm of a Franciscan monk. I just didn’t fit anywhere as a woman among my contemporaries. I had one very close female friend that is still (40 years later) the oldest and most enduring friendship I’ve ever had. She happens to be an engineer—an intellectual and as deeply curious and passionate as I am. She was a refuge in college because she was a woman in a non-traditional field, just like me as an aspiring seminarian turned Air Force ROTC cadet. Most of my interests were not shared by other women. I loved the military. She loved airplanes and actually worked as an engineer on aircraft engines for Lockheed. I loved studying religion. She loved philosophy and science. As you recall, I went to college with an interest in attending seminary after getting a bachelor’s degree. I wrote to the U.S. Chief of Chaplains about pursuing chaplaincy in the Air Force, but never received a response. In 1982, I doubt there was a woman military chaplain. Maybe the Chief of Chaplains didn’t know how to answer my letter? I’ll never know. When it became clear to me that I could no longer call myself a Methodist (due to my fascination with becoming Catholic), I abandoned any thought of seminary. I eventually pursued what I knew from my own family upbringing as a military brat and in response to my second love; military service for the country I loved. I joined ROTC at the University of Tennessee and decided to pursue a military career. My “holy longing” was put on pause while I pursued a desire to test myself and to follow in my father’s military footsteps. Or, so I thought. The Hound of Heaven never let me wander off His path completely, in spite of my stubborn efforts to create life and reality in my own fashion and to worship my own ways instead of His. If you enjoy poetry, I encourage you to meditate on this beautiful poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” an autobiographical ode written by Francis Thompson, a man who endured a very difficult life. His poem is a conversation between the poet and someone who won’t leave him alone, but who pursues him through every dark path. In the end, the poet discovers that the one pursuing him all this time was actually the object of his longing, God. It is the story of the human experience; about our nature, which betrays us with sinful pride and yet taunts us with a holy longing and a holy knowing. My favorite lines are in the beginning and the end of the poem (it’s 182 lines, so I just included my favorites):

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;…

ow of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:

‘And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

Strange, piteous, futile thing!

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught’ (He said),

‘And human love needs human meriting:

How hast thou merited—

Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?

Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art!Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,

Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

All which thy child’s mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’

Here is a modern adaptation that is particularly engaging: