“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[1]

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Snaking lines of eighteen-wheeler trucks wind up the steep grade of Cajon Pass, Interstate 15, as dense fog enshrouds my car. Driving is precarious. My father taught me that when I can’t see in a situation like this, get behind a truck that is all lit up and I would be OK. Other cars whizz by confidently into the fog, perhaps in a hurry to get to Las Vegas. At the summit, the blanketing fog retreats. Brilliant sun fills the morning light. The turnoff to Highway 395 comes quickly. You have to be watching for it.

Years ago, as I drove through the village of Adelanto, there was only one stop sign and one signal. The ancient landscape of Joshua trees, creosote and sagebrush has now been scraped away for closely packed new neighborhoods. How strange to see compactly planned homes with high walls around them, surrounded by the remnants of the desert. This is Adelanto. Some of my Santa Ana parishioners moved here to find a cheaper home and to get away from the lure and pressure of gang life that their children had to negotiate. But the gangs moved here too. I pass through Adelanto and at last an unspoiled desert landscape beckons. Soon I am back into the sagebrush ocean spilling out for miles east and west. No fences here.

That feeling begins to well up in my gut: the vastness and emptiness conjure a deep longing within me. The highway continues north, climbs a steep hill, and at a curve in the road I am caught breathless. Pulling over to a viewpoint off the highway, I stop my car, turn off the engine and contemplate a widescreen visita of the desert waking to a new day. Purple mountains become rose then golden, as the sun rises in the east. What is this feeling welling up within me? A sweet, welcome longing. What does this mean? Even now as I write about this memory, the aching feeling wells up within me.

Years later, after our son Erik returned from a week at the hospital, he lays on the sofa in our living room, legs draped over my lap. I rub his stocking feet, grateful that he is home again. I turn on the TV to the YouTube Channel, playing Elgar’s Nimrod. The soft beginning movements swell to a crescendo. Then the sound drifts off into silence. The feeling of yearning and longing returns. Where is this leading?

These feelings of longing and yearning for I know not what continued to be a mystery until I read Ron Rolheiser’s book The Holy Longing. My life has not been the same. He gave voice to these inner movements of my soul, as he wrote:

“Inside of us it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things, and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest.

We are driven persons, forever obsessing, congenitally dis-eased, living lives of quiet desperation only occasionally experiencing peace. Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.

Spirituality is about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings. Augustine said, ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is what we do with our unrest.’”[2]

When I taught my students in my world religions class at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, California, I began to use this passage from Holy Longing. I described my desert experience contemplating the desert awakening to morning. I asked my students if they had moments when they experienced restless yearning and desire, not knowing why? The responses were quick and energized. “Yes, I had that same experience! I did not know what to do with it.” I asked the students to write down their experience if that had one and bring it to class to share next week. These reflections from the students animated the next few class sessions.

My friend and scholar on the work of spiritual writer C. S. Lewis, Dr. Jim Prothero, introduced me to Lewis’ work on Holy Longing. It is an important theme in his writing, reflecting on the German word Sehnsucht: an unfulfilled longing sweeter than any other human desire. Lewis advises that this deep desire never leaves us. We were made for another world. This haunting sense of longing stayed with Lewis his entire life, an inconsolable longing in the human heart “for which we know not what.”

Lewis describes this inconsolable longing in The Weight of Glory:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suppressing it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of the name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that has settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought that beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—-the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire, but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”[3]

When I have tried to describe these aching feelings of yearning and longing for I know not what to my friends and parishioners, I struggle for words in my discomfort. I cannot put my hand firmly on what is happening within me. When I have tried to share these experiences with my fellow philosophy professors, they seem to look on me as quaint and quirky, caught up in naïve mysticism. My academic work has been within an educational world suspicious of mystery, of that which cannot be concretely named and categorized.

C. S. Lewis lived and taught in that same academic world. He reflects:

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice, almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”[4]

In 2013, Pope Francis presented a homily on restlessness. Francis said, “What fundamental restlessness did Augustine have in his life? What kinds of restlessness does this great and holy man ask us to awaken and to keep alive in our own existence?”

It was the restlessness of spiritual seeking. Augustine had a brilliant career as a teacher of rhetoric, and his restless spiritual seeking for life’s deepest meaning continued. He discovered that God had been waiting for him all along.

Francis asks us: “Look into the depths of your heart, look into your own inner depths and ask yourself: do you have a heart that desires something great or a heart that has been lulled to sleep by things?”

“We all experience spiritual unease or restlessness. We are drawn toward connection to God. Each of us has a spark of the divine within us and “this spark restlessly flickers until we go to God eternally.’ Without the gift of the grace of God, humanity experiences a gravity that pulls us toward passing pleasures and transitory satisfaction.”[5]

In 1944, 13-year-old Anne Frank was a hunted Jewish girl hidden in the attic of a Dutch home. She wrote the following in her diary,

“Today the sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze, and I am longing so longing for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone.

“And I do so long…to cry! I feel as if I am going to burst, and I know that it would get better with crying, but I can’t. I’m restless. I go from room to room, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, ‘can’t you satisfy my longing at last?’

I believe that it is spring within me. I feel that spring is awakening. I feel it is my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally., I feel utterly confused. I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing.”[6]

Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, reflects:

“There is in all of us, at the very center of our lives, a tension, an aching, a burning in the heart that is insatiable, non-quietable and very deep. Sometimes, we experience this longing as focused on a person, particularly if we are in a love that is not consummated. Other times, we experience this yearning as a longing to attain something. Most often, though, it is a longing without a clear name or focus, an aching that cannot be clearly pinpointed or described. Like Anne Frank, we only know that we are restless, full of disquiet, aching at a level that we cannot seem to get at…. This hopeless aching and lack of ease is the very basis of the spiritual life.”[7]

Late spring afternoon in the Eastern Sierra, California. I have been slowly hiking through the desert landscape in the Alabama Hills, between the village of Lone Pine and the road to Mount Whitney. Delicate wildflowers burst through coarse sand: red Indian Paintbrush, yellow Western Bleeding Heart, and pink Pussypaw. I follow a faint animal trail through creosote and sagebrush, watching for the cholla cactus, the “jumping cactus” whose barbed thorns can leap onto legs and hands. The back of my shirt is soaked with sweat. A light breeze blows clouds of fine dust, forcing me to cover my eyes. This often happens near sunset, which is happening now, as the bright orange orb slowly sinks behind Mount Whitney. Moods change at this transition from daylight to dusk. I feel it. A burst of wind blows a tumbleweed past me. Bats fly low, chasing bugs.

The Alabama Hills are iconic: gnarled, strangely shaped boulders jumbled together and piled high. You recognize this place from the hundreds of Western movies made here. I retreat into a protective cleft of boulders. Time to pray Evening Prayer, one of the monastic services that take us through each day of God’s time. I find the app on my cell phone, reading out loud the opening prayers and psalms. My favorite canticle is the Phos Hilaron, O Gracious Light. The sun has set behind Mount Whitney.

Within the descending darkness I am embraced by God’s love.

“O gracious light, pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven, O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!

Now as we come to the setting of the sun, and our eyes behold the vesper light, we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O Giver of life, and to be glorified through all the worlds.”[8]

Within the descending darkness I am embraced by God’s love.

[1] Augustine, Confessions, 1.1.1.

[2] Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 6-7.

[3] Lewis, the Weight of Glory, p

[4] Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p

[5] Order of Augustine, 2237, Spiritual Unease.

[6] Anne Frank, Diary, p

[7] Ron Rolheiser, Longing is Our Spiritual Lot, May 2, 1987.

[8] Book of Common Prayer, 118.