Longing

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."

This quote from C.S. Lewis really has me thinking. I believe that many of our complex emotions stem from this longing that Lewis talks about. We are created for something more, something better, something clean and whole. When our head and heart slow down a bit, we find feelings arising in us that take us beyond the immediacy of check lists, burdens of the day, and the urgency of the "now".

Nostalgia rises unbidden in our hearts drawing us back to times and places where we had a glimmer of that something better, of that land of beauty.

Melancholy is the unsettled condition of a heart that laments often un-nameable wrongs in life. We sense that things are not as they ought to be.

Even submissiveness (which is both feeling and action) is an attempt to live out the restful surrender to a loving God and the order He established. I think we all long for this. Many heartaches in life arise because we have been submissive to things that are not God.

Curiosity and playfulness reveal that we carry a hidden and often tarnished sense of whimsy. Our longing for the place of beauty that Lewis mentions points to a carefully created world made to be explored by, or perhaps revealed to us.

Awe, in its biggest breath-stealing and jaw-dropping and silence-inducing sense, is the overwhelming sense of amazement that we feel when our creatureliness is confronted with the grandeur of a cosmos that points towards our Creator. Again, hidden within awe is the longing to be fully present in that land and with the One who made it.

Hope, that most important of feelings and one that is not simply wishful thinking, is actually grounded in that longed for land where all beauty comes from. Our hearts are wired for hope and sadly we try to anchor that sense of hope in something and someone lesser than God.

I have realized that these complex emotions take some effort to cultivate. Even melancholy takes a pensiveness that can't happen in the rush of life. This C.S. Lewis quote has helped me realize my need to let my heart and eyes wander far and wide so that they can glimpse those distant shores that will one day be home. These feelings help orient our hearts to what we were truly meant to be and what will one day ultimately become of us.

If you are interested in some ways to help cultivate at least a few of these feelings check out this blog post that has long been a favorite.