Daily Images of God--Lent 2022
Day 28
March 29
YEARNING
God is yearning, and we are in God’s image.
When Jesus, back from the dead, appears to his friends, he asks them if they have something for him to eat (Luke 24:41). After the torments of the cross, death, and the harrowing of hell itself, Jesus is hungry! Physical hunger here is a touchstone for what it is to be fully human and alive; Luke includes the detail as evidence that the risen Jesus was not some ethereal ghost, but truly alive.
To be human is to hunger. To be human is to yearn.
We are hungry creatures. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being. Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.” In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy. There is an empty hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God.
This most basic and important need, according to traditional Christian teaching, can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now. In sacramental theology, it is re-presented by bread and wine. In most of our day-to-day lives, it is manifested by an urge to have close personal connection, love, with others. In talk about final things, it is the souls of the blessed simply viewing, taking in, the presence of God.
This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana. It is the Christian doctrine closest to the idea of gratifying desire in secular hedonism. But in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, through the negation of what it seems to mean to be human. And in hedonism, the sating of desire means its end, at least for the moment. (Don’t take that as a recommendation to follow Oscar Wilde’s bon mot about giving in to temptation as the quickest way to end it!) But in Christianity, the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire. The presence of God both satisfies our hunger while it stimulates our appetite.
The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns:
"Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.
... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever."
“Do you have anything to eat?” Hungry Jesus asks for food, and invites his followers to share bread with him, be his “companions.” Jesus is hungry for us to share with him. God yearns for us. Creator seeks creature just as we creatures have a yearning for God.
The great neo-Platonist theologian known to tradition as Dionysius the Areopagite, the proto-mystic of the church who inspired the desert fathers and mothers and the Benedictines later on, in his writing On the Names of God, at one point gives God the name, “Yearning.”
Italian mystic Bianco da Siena put it this way:
"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, ‘til 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 he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling."
God is yearning, and we are in God’s image.
Image: Supper at Emmaus, Carravagio.
No comments:
Post a Comment