A LONGING HEART - Our desire for God
We choose all
"Our hearts are restless," wrote St. Augustine, and that truth
remains fundamental to the human condition. Human restlessness,
human desire, human yearning - none of it ever seems finally and
fully satisfied. The baby beginning to crawl and explore the environment
is an expression of human restlessness; the journeying of the
first Carmelites who left their homes to gather in a valley on
Mount Carmel was fuelled by the same desire. We are truly pilgrims.
We humans never have enough because, with St. Thérèse
of Lisieux, we choose all. And we will never rest until we get
it. The Carmelite tradition recognises this hunger in the human
heart and says we are made this way. We are made to seek and search,
to yearn and ache, until the heart finally finds something or
someone to match the depth of its desire, until the heart finds
food sufficient for its hunger. We name that food, that fulfilment,
that goal of human desire, God. Carmelites have been intentionally
pursuing that elusive, mysterious fulfilment for 800 years. "I
wanted to live," wrote St. Teresa of Avila, "but
I had no one to give me life..." (1)
We believe that, named or not, every human being is on this quest.
We can assume this: that every student in our school, every member
of our parish, every pilgrim to our shrine, every candidate in
our seminary has an openness to the transcendent mystery we name
God. Time and time again the desire will be denied, the hunger
temporarily satisfied, the yearning stifled, distracted, weak.
But we know it is there and it will emerge in one form or another.
Our tradition has the power, the language, the imagery to help
illumine what people are experiencing in their innermost being.
The Carmelite tradition attempts to name the hunger, give words
to the desire, and express the journey's end in God. The human
heart will forever need this clarification of its wants. Carmel
has wanted the same thing and will walk with anyone who is met
along the way. We cannot satisfy their hunger, but can help them
find words for it and know where it points. We can do it, and
have done it, in art, in poetry and song, in counselling and teaching,
in simply listening and understanding. And we can warn people
that eventually all words fail and at times all we have is the
desire itself.
One contemporary author observes that a serious problem in spirituality
today is a naiveté about the desire or energy that drives
us. Our God-given spiritual longing, which may be expressed in
numerous ways, including creative, erotic energy, is dangerous
for us if not carefully tended. We are naive about this deep desire
within us and are not alert to its danger. Without a reverence
toward this energy and ways of accessing it and keeping it contained,
most adults waver between alienation from this fire and therefore
live in depression, or allow themselves to be consumed by it and
live in a state of inflation.
Depression, in this sense, means the inability to take child-like
delight in life, to feel true joy. Inflation refers to our tendency,
at times, to identify with this fire, this power of the gods.
"...We are generally so full of ourselves that we are a menace
to our families, friends, communities, and ourselves." Unable
to handle this energy we either feel dead inside or are hyperactive
and restless. "Spirituality is about finding the proper
ways, disciplines, by which to both access that energy and contain
it".(2)
Desires
of the Carmelites
This dilemma would be understood by the saints of Carmel, They
approached this flame found deep in their humanity and were burned
and purified by it in their encounter. Teresa of Avila understood
it as the water Jesus offered the Samaritan woman. More fire than
water, it increases one's desire. "How thirsty one becomes
for this thirst!" (3) John of the Cross begins his poem
The Spiritual Canticle by complaining, "Where have you
hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning? You fled like the stag after
wounding me; I went out calling you, but you were gone."
(4) John's understanding of our humanity is that we wake up in
the middle of a love story. Someone has touched our hearts, wounding
them, and making them ache for fulfilment. Who has done this to
us, and where has that one gone? Those questions haunt every human
being's journey, and propel every step from the crawling of a
baby, to a Pope's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and all the human
endeavour in-between.
John complained that our desires are like little children. We
pay attention to them and they settle down for a while. But soon
they are up and noisily disrupting the peace of the house. Or,
our desires are like a longed-for day with a loved one; but the
day turns out to be a big disappointment! John's understanding
of our humanity is that we have a hunger for which only God is
sufficient food.
Thérèse of Lisieux found her deepest desires captured
by the image of heaven: heaven as the never-ending Sunday, the
eternal retreat, the eternal shore. The eternal shore is a particularly.
evocative expression holding her heart's yearning. She chose all
in life, and this image for her is an expression of all that she
desires. But no image or concept fully expresses her longings:
"I feel how powerless I am to express in human language the secrets of heaven, and after writing page upon page I find that I have not yet begun. There are so many different horizons, so many nuances of infinite variety ...." (SS. 189)
We reach out to this and that,
lured by a promise of fulfilment, but only to be disappointed
time and time again. Using Thérèse's image, we arrive
at many shores, but each time we realise it is not the eternal
shore.
Spirit and psyche inhabit the same country of the mind. Spirit
is the dynamism in us to fullness of being, to knowing all, loving
all, being one with all. Psyche expresses these desires with primordial
images drawn from the body, from the earth. Psyche connects the
organism of the body and its rootedness in the cosmos with the
transcendence of spirit and its yearning for fullness. Our images
of hope, such as of eternal shore, express both psyche
and spirit.
Psyche's images are freighted with spirit's yearnings. They may
stir up and express our longings for peace and justice, they may
open us to profound repentance, they may throw light on our existence
and illumine our path, they may provide hopeful scenarios of our
future beyond this life, as Thérèse's did. But,
none of them is adequate to finally and fully express the desires
within us, the desire that we are. Our deepest yearning to know
and to love, to be one with, all there is, is never fulfilled.
Our deepest hungers never find sufficient food in this life. Our
wants are given voice, but what do we want?
Theologian Bernard Lonergan believed that if we follow the trail
of our deepest desires, expressing them in truth, facing them,
and responding to their call in our lives, we will undergo conversions.
Our wants, our desires will be purified and transformed, until
more and more we want what God wants in a consonance of desire.
What do the men and women in our parishes, our retreat houses,
in counselling want? Everything! Count on it, and minister to
it. And we say to ourselves and them, that the hunger within us
is so deep and powerful that, acknowledged or not, only God is
sufficient food. When Jesus preached the present and coming Reign
of God he was speaking precisely to the deep desires, the holy
longing in the hearts of his listeners.
"March 24, 2000 was the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador. He was killed while celebrating Eucharist in a Carmelite chapel. Romero's conversion from a rather traditional, professional cleric with a sincere but otherworldly piety, to an outspoken courageous shepherd of his people, came because he saw the longing in the faces of his people. As he celebrated the funerals of those killed by the powerful, and read off the names of the disappeared, he found it was his duty more and more to give voice to these voiceless ones, to express their oppressed longings - to embody in his courageous presence the holy longing of the Salvadoran people."
To assist people in hearing
and voicing their deepest longing is part of Carmel's continuing
ministry. The first Carmelites established conditions in their
small valley which would bring order to their multiple desires.
Each inhabited a cell and the cells surrounded a chapel, in which
they daily remembered God's desire for them. Teresa of Avila founded
enclosed communities within which the women could open themselves
to the full force of their desires in affectionate friendship
with the Lord and one another. She encouraged them to follow the
lure of their depths as their fragmented desires found healing
and reorientation. Both she and Thérèse believed
firmly that if God has given us such longings God will ultimately
fulfil them. We are not a useless passion.
Summary
Our Carmelite tradition acknowledges the hunger for God deep in
the human heart. This yearning or longing propels us through our
lives as we seek a fulfilment of our heart's desire. This deep
current of desire within our lives is the result of God having
first desired us. God, the first contemplative, gazed on us and
made us lovable, and alluring to God. The Carmelite tradition
does not speak of an annihilation of desire, but a transformation
of desire so that more and more we desire what God desires in
a consonance of desire. As Teresa of Avila said simply, now
I want what You want.
Questions
for reflection