Yearning (Midweek Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Yearning

August 30, 2017

All the smoke in the air from wild fires surrounding the Rogue Valley is aggravating my asthma.  I am needing to nebulize two or three times a day; otherwise, I find myself gasping for air and wheezing constantly.  The shortage of breath I experience when not medicating, something I have not felt so acutely since I left China 6 years ago, has brought to my mind the nature of need and yearning. My ache for a good deep breath is the most vivid expression for me of what yearning is:  a desperate need that is in the background at all times but at moments so acute that it pushes all other things out of the mind.  When I have enough breath, I am unaware of my need for air.  But when the smoke makes my breathing hard, I can think of little else. 

So it is also with our need for God.  

Saint Augustine said that we are all born with a hole in the middle of our hearts and souls, a God-shaped hole that only the Creator can fill.  Where many secular-minded people see the presence of evil things in the world as evidence that there is no God, I believe that it is our very revulsion at and lack of acceptance of such a state of affairs that is the clearest evidence of God in the world:  the very fact that we find natural beauty appealing and the very fact that we find unsatisfying and repellent the ugly things that are also naturally in this world--this is a reflection of the great unseen truth that there is something beyond and better than how things are.  A fish in a fishbowl is unaware of the water all about it; out of the bowl, the fish gulps and gasps and is acutely aware of its need for something that is not there but that it needs.     

Yearning is the entry point for the transcendent in our life.  Experience of illness, pain, or weakness often serves as an access point for us to God.   

Late Medieval mystic Bianco da Siena wrote a poem about this: 

Come down, O Love divine,

  seek thou this soul of mine,

  and visit it with thine own ardor glowing;

  O Comforter, draw near,

  within my heart appear,

  and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.

O let it freely burn,

  till earthly passions turn

  to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;

  and let thy glorious light

  shine ever on my sight,

  and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.

And so the yearning strong,

  with which the soul will long,

  shall far outpass the power of human telling;

  for none can guess its grace,

  till Love create a place

  wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling. 

(tr. Richard Frederick Littledale [1833-1890]). 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+