As I write this blog, summer is coming to a close. It is less than one week until school begins. My granddaughter, Rosie, will be starting kindergarten and so her preschool days are winding down and her parents and grandparents feel both excitement for all that is beginning for her and sadness at all that is ending.
Last Saturday John and I (Rosie’s grandparents) went to the zoo with Rosie, her mom, her brother, her aunt, her uncle, and her cousins. We had a wonderful time at the zoo but by the end we were all exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and pushed a bit beyond our comfort zone. Rosie thought we were going to join her cousins for dinner, but it didn’t work out for us. When Rosie learned we were leaving and that we had to say goodbye to her cousins, she wept. She was so sad to say goodbye. Rosie expressed visibly what I was feeling internally, a sadness I felt so profoundly related to a longing that can never be fulfilled. There is never enough time with the people we love. Never a way to fully express the love we feel for them. I was feeling this longing melancholy all day because I recognized that the quiet summer days with their spaciousness were going to soon give way to schedules, activities, and commitments that would keep us from seeing each other for longer than we hoped.
Longing. It lies at the heart of our relationship with others and at the heart of our relationship with God. We mistakenly look for a spirituality or a faith that would fill us so fully that it would eliminate the painful longing, the incompleteness that surrounds even our best times. But maybe instead of eliminating our longing and our awareness of incompleteness, we are called to let them teach us instead.
The hunger of the human heart lies at the center of Karl Rahner’s theology. Karl Rahner, a Jesuit priest and theologian, is one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century. Rahner points to the emptiness and loneliness that everyone experiences and argues that human hearts are more like empty stomachs than empty boxes, always searching, always yearning to be filled. For Rahner, this hunger, this yearning, this longing, this incompleteness is a gift, given to us by God. It is a gift because this yearning, longing, loneliness, and incompleteness draws us beyond ourselves as we look to fill our emptiness. God’s love gives us this longing, so that we will seek and find God. God offers himself to us as gift, meeting us in our questions, meeting us as we look to find a way to fill the loneliness, meeting us as we seek food for our hungry hearts.
Rahner speaks of God as an infinite horizon of meaning and says that we walk toward this horizon all our lives but like all horizons it continuously eludes us. We keep walking toward it, but it is always a bit beyond us. This infinite horizon draws us toward God through our questions about the source and meaning of our lives. Rahner says that human beings are a question to themselves, and this question can be denied, repressed, but never destroyed. The questions about meaning that we ask, are God’s grace working within us. The questions emerge through our longing for God, through our longing for meaning, and through these questions, we are drawn ever closer to God who is a mystery not because he is remote from us, but because he is so near to us.
Psychiatrist and spiritual writer Gerald May expresses concerns with any faith that claims fulfillment as evidence of success. He writes,
Most importantly, the myth of fulfillment makes us miss the most beautiful aspect of our human souls: our emptiness, our incompleteness, our radical yearning for love. We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. In this way we participate in love becoming life, life becoming love. To miss our emptiness is, finally to miss our hope.
Entering the Emptiness
Gerald May
Deep down the longing we experience in all our relationships is a taste of the fullness of love we will only experience in heaven. Our lives on earth are limited and fragmented. We feel those limitations when we are unable to fully express the love we feel for others. We feel how fragmented our lives are through our longing to hold others close, through our desire for endless communion with them. When we stop trying to cover over, fill up, and eliminate our longing and instead allow that longing to lead us to the deep waters of prayer within us, then we begin to taste the love that God is communicating to us through our hungry hearts.
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
