thought exercise on Longing

Many of the greatest Christian spiritual teachers and mystics such as Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius Loyola, or some of the seventeenth-century Anglican spiritual writers focus on the language...

Have you ever noticed how closely the words longing and belonging are connected? I’m not sure of their exact etymology, but I do believe that our deepest longing in life is to be-...

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

In this excerpt of a poem by William Wordsworth, the poet describes our yearning for life beyond this life. Our desire for something greater than ourselves: Whether we be young or old, Our desti...

A large part of what it means to be human is to be one who longs after things. Sometimes, we have trouble putting into words the longings inside us. Take for example these words from Anne Frank, just ...

Joy’s trick is to supply  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,  Leaving them dumbstruck also with an  ache Nothing can satisfy.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this in a 2003 book called The Progress Paradox. Easterbrook’s subtitle was How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He describes how affluent we have become—​​​bett...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

Tony Reinke does a great job capturing the deep ambivalence many of us feel about our smartphones in this short excerpt: This blasted smartphone! Pesk of productivity. Tenfold plague of beeps and ...

The Old Testament portrays the world as it is, no holds barred. In its pages you will find passionate stories of love and hate, blood-chilling stories of rape and dismemberment, matter-of-fact account...

One of the most quotable movies of all time was released in 1994. It featured a rising comedic genius from Canada, paired with another highly successful actor, as well as a considerable ensemble cast ...

I recently found, hidden in plain sight, the secret formula for writing a bestselling book. Yes, you read that right. My discovery created a surge of power that I could hardly handle. It felt like lea...

In The Chimes, the second of Charles Dickens five Christmas stories, nine-year old Lillian Fern, orphaned and under the guardianship of her father’s brother Will, is taken in for the night by Tobias (...

Considered perhaps the greatest guitarist alive, Christopher Parkening appeared to have it all. Signed to an international recording deal as a teenager, Parkening traveled across the world playing bea...

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

Recently I’ve wondered about the connection between the English words “longing” and “belonging”. Isn’t belonging one of our greatest longings in life? Don’t we all have some deep, inner desire t...

Many of us presume that atheists and agnostics don’t think or care one bit for God. But this is not the case. Heinrich Böll, a German writer and devout Catholic, once joked, “I don’t like these atheis...

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

There are at least ten God-created longings of the soul:  1. To see my body as sacred  2. To be wanted, desired  3. To be loved without condition  4. To be intimately connected to God  5. T...

There is a lovely disarray that comes with attraction. When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin to lose your grip on the frames that order your life. Indeed, much of you...

Whenever I am traveling, I constantly look forward to the moment when I will return home. Even if I’m very busy and preoccupied, in the back of my mind one thought is always present: “Soon I’ll be goi...

In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...

In the fall of 1986, just out of college, I set out to hitchhike across the northwestern part of the United States. I’d hardly ever been west of the Hudson River, and in my mind what waited for me out...

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders and several centuries later by St. Ignatius of Loyola are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but inste...

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C. S. Lewis describes this...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home, Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel describes the central longing in both...

Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

There is a deep longing in every human heart to return to our ancestral home. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing about this in their song “Woodstock”: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden.” T...