Anam Cara

Divine Longing Transfigures Absence

One of the lovely things about longing is that it is not merely an abstract concept. Every heart has longing. This means that longing is always full of feeling. There is great concentration now on “getting in touch with your feelings” and “expressing your feelings.” There is often more than a whiff of narcissism about these projects. In this practice we have increasingly lost sight of the beauty and wholesomeness of feeling itself. Feeling is a powerful disclosure of our humanity. A person who can really feel things is fully in touch with his or her own nature. Such nature is difficult to grasp and define, but we do know that we can trust someone who has nature. When we say “There is great nature” in a person, we mean that there is a presence of feeling in them that is passionate, deep, and caring. We can trust that even in awkward times of confusion and conflict the pendulum of nature will eventually come to rest in truth and compassion. It also suggests a deeper substrate of presence than personality, role, or image. When we lose touch with our Nature, we become less human. When we discover our own nature, we find new belonging.

The feeling of longing in your heart was not put there by yourself. We have seen how each of us was conceived in longing, and every moment here has been a pilgrimage of longing. Your life is a path of longing through ever-changing circles of belonging. Your longing echoes the Divine Longing. The heart of transcendence is longing. God is not abstract or aloof. We have done terrible damage to the image of God. We have caricatured God as an ungracious moral accountant and done what we should never have done: We have frozen the feeling of God and drawn the separated mind of God into war with our own nature. God has not done that; our thinking has. The results have been terrible. We have been abandoned in an empty universe with our poor hearts restless in a haunted longing; furthermore, this has closed the door on any possibility of entering into our true belonging. We are victims of longing, and we cannot come home. The thinking that has invented and institutionalized this way of life has damaged us; we are at once guilty and afraid. Of such a God E. M. Cioran writes: “All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.” Our vision is our home. We need to think God anew as the most passionate presence in the universe—the primal well of presence from which all longing flows, and the home where we all belong and to which all belonging returns. God is present to us in a form that endlessly invites our longing, namely, in the form of absence. Simone Weil said, “The apparent absence of God in this world is the actual reality of God.”

God has a great heart. Only a divine artist with such huge longing would have the beauty and tenderness of imagination to dream and create such a wonderful universe. God is full of longing: every stone, tree, wave, and human countenance testifies to the eternal and creative ripple of Divine Longing. This is the tender immensity of Jesus. He is the intimate linkage of everything. William Blake used the phrase “Christ the Imagination.” The deepest nature of everything is longing. This is why there is always such hope of change and transfiguration. Beneath even the most hardened surfaces longing waits. Great music or poetry will always reach us because our longing loves to be echoed. Neither can we ever immunize ourselves against love; it knows in spite of us exactly how to whisper our longing awake. It is as if, under the clay of your presence, streams of living water flow. Great moments always surprise you. The routine is broken, and unexpected crevices appear on the safe surface of your life. Such moments dowse you—they make you recognize that within you there is eternity.

You should never allow any person or institution to own or control your longing. No one has a right to deny you the beautiful adventure of God by turning you into a serf of a cold and sinister deity. When you let that happen, it makes you homeless. You are a child of Divine Longing. In your deepest nature you are one with your God. As Meister Eckhart says so beautifully, “The eye with which I see God is God’s eye seeing me.”

That circle of seeing and presence is ultimate belonging. It is fascinating that Jesus did not stay on the earth. He made himself absent in order that the Holy Spirit could come. The ebb and flow of presence and absence is the current of our lives; each of them configures our time and space in the world. Yet there is a force that pervades both presence and absence: this is spirit. There is nowhere to locate spirit and neither can it be subtracted from anything. Spirit is everywhere. Spirit is in everything. By nature and definition, spirit can never be absent. Consequently, all space is spiritual space, and all time is secret eternity. All absence is full of hidden presence.

In the pulse-beat is the life and the longing, all embraced in the great circle of belonging, reaching everywhere, leaving nothing and no one out. This embrace is mostly concealed from us who climb the relentless and vanishing escalator of time and journey outside where space is lonesome with distance. All we hear are whispers, all we see are glimpses; but each of us has the divinity of imagination which warms our hearts with the beauty and depth of a world woven from glimpses and whispers, an eternal world that meets the gaze of our eyes and the echo of our voices to assure us that from all eternity we have belonged, and to answer the question that echoes at the heart of all longing: While we are here, where is it that we are absent from?