Held

Having had a few interesting discussions about the intensity of emotions recently, I went and dug up this article I read awhile back which made something of an impression on me then. (can’t remember if I’ve blogged it before actually!) Thought it worthwhile to put this excerpt up here, if anything to remind myself to stop dwelling on/obsessing over my own thoughts.

Connecting

And there is the other side of longing — for whatever reason, it just happens. We long for the company and attention of certain people for no clear reason. This longing might have a physical dimension, but the physical element (if present) is only part of the whole experience.“Some people come into our lives and have a gift to give us by arousing intense longings,” wrote Gail Godwin in Father Melancholy’s Daughter. “Often they are not all they could be, in themselves. But some intensity in us exactly matches some intensity in them, some essentialness in us meets a similar essentialness in them…. Whatever the outcome of these feelings, mightn’t they suggest the possibility of a union far better than anything we have so far known?”

When I first came across this quote, it was as though a window had been opened in a room that had been too stuffy for too long. I realized that the phenomenon of feeling a connection with another person is just part of life. I suspect it could happen to one person multiple times during the course of a life, because we are created for intimacy. In this life, the most intimate bond is marriage, but in the next world we are not given in marriage. It is impossible to guess how we will know each other in the world to come, but we do know that the aching and separation we experience down here will cease. Only then we will understand what love is.

Perhaps part of what we call “infatuation” is the experience of seeing, for one moment, the real person before us, in all their God-given glory and fragility. People’s faces, especially, can break our hearts. “There is nothing so astonishing as a human face,” wrote Marilyn Robinson in Gilead. “Because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

Loneliness and longing are often tied together. Many of us long for people with which we can’t (for whatever reason) have the level of closeness we might crave. Still, we can still see our longings as a bittersweet gift if we can look up from the tangled web of our own desires and see that they point past us, past the other person, to something more infinite.

Eternal Possibilities

These experiences hint at the type of closeness we hope for in the world to come, where we will be known, even as we are fully known, as we experience an intimacy with God and all redeemed creatures that we can only faintly imagine now. The aches we experience remind us that we still live here, in our shadowy bodies and broken world. But our longings can also remind us that we are moving toward something more.

On the most fundamental level, our aches point homeward. As Frederick Buechner wrote, “Beneath the longing to possess and to be possessed by the beauty of another sexually — to know, in the Biblical idiom — there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at last where we finally belong…. When I think of all the beautiful ones whom I have seen for maybe no more than a passing moment and have helplessly, overwhelmingly desired, I wonder if at the innermost heart of my desiring, there wasn’t, of all things, homesickness.”

Sometimes we have to dig deep to understand what we’re really longing for. Often the things we think we want wouldn’t actually satisfy us if we could have them. Our deepest desire, buried under and running through all the others — is for union with God and all redeemed creatures. That desire comes from the One who planted it in us, wounding us that way so that we can follow our aches home.