Christian spirituality: Restless longing for the divine life
We are made for the eternal and therefore cannot be ultimately satisfied by the temporal
Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit priest considered to be one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century, wrote that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony”.
The Fire Within, by Fr Ronald RolheiserIn his book The Fire Within, Fr Ronald Rolheiser asserts that “each of us is a bundle of untamed Eros, of wild desire, of longing, of restlessness, of loneliness, of dissatisfaction, of sexuality, and of instability. Inside all that disquiet we need two things: an understanding of why we cannot sit still in a room for an hour, and sacred permission to know it is normal and good to feel that way. In short, we need to know that our restlessness makes sense, and that God is smiling on it.”
At the core of experience, at the centre of our hearts, there is longing. At every level, our being aches, and we are full of tension. We give it different names – loneliness, restlessness, emptiness, longing, yearning, nostalgia, incompleteness.
When St Augustine says “you have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”, he is, of course, pointing out the reason why God would have made us that way. And, as the prayer indicates, the ultimate value of longing lies precisely in its incessant nature; by never letting us rest with anything less than the infinite and eternal, it guarantees that we will seek God or be frustrated.
Longing shapes the soul in many ways, particularly by helping create the space within us where God can be born. Longing and yearning open us to unions that otherwise would not happen, particularly in terms of our relationship to God.
But in a world that is ignoring and denying the existence of the soul, becoming soulless, while it magnifies the physical and the body, while it promotes immediate gratification and endorses success at all cost, we are heavily influenced to try to soothe our restlessness and longing, to beat our sense of incompleteness, by indulging excessively in earthly affairs, to fantasy, to illusion, to false grandiosity, and to false beliefs and values that are short-lived and take us back to our original state of unfulfilled life.
We forget that we are made for the eternal and therefore cannot be ultimately satisfied by the temporal. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21)
Fr Rolheiser suggests a remedy against these outside forces that seem to offer an answer for our restlessness. He suggests trying to find a higher love by which to transcend the more immediate power of our natural instincts… offering others our altruism and the gaze of admiration will feel so good and right that it will bring to fulfilment what we are really yearning for… forgive ourselves often, live, knowing that God’s mercy is a well that is never exhausted… live under God’s patience and understanding.
Live and in everything you do, try to ‘find God in all things’.
Gordon Vassallo is an accredited spiritual guide, Centre for Ignatian Spirituality