The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [30]
Some people try to fill that hole with money, status, or power. They think: If only I had more I would be happy. A better job. A nicer house. Yet even after acquiring these things, people may still feel incomplete, as if they’re chasing something they can never catch. They race ahead, straining to reach the goal of fulfillment, yet it always seems tantalizingly out of reach. The prize of wholeness is elusive. Emptiness remains.
That was my experience early in my business career. After graduating with a business degree, I thought that once I landed a good job, pumped up my bank account, and filled my closet with elegant suits, I would be happy. But even with a job, money, and the best suits I could afford, I wasn’t satisfied. Something was missing. It would take me several years to figure out what it was.
One of the best reflections on this topic comes from the twentieth-century spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and psychologist, wrote a perceptive book called The Selfless Way of Christ in which he examined this relentless quest to fill the empty hole in our lives. He observes that those rushing to fill that hole already sense that it is a useless quest.
Somewhere deep in our hearts we already know that success, fame, influence, power, and money do not give us the inner joy and peace we crave. Somewhere we can even sense a certain envy of those who have shed all false ambitions and found a deeper fulfillment in their relationship with God. Yes, somewhere we can even get a taste of that mysterious joy in the smile of those who have nothing to lose.
In their drive to fill this hole, some are pulled toward addictive behaviors, anything to fill them up: drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping, sexual activity, compulsive eating. But those addictions lead only to a greater sense of disintegration, a more cavernous emptiness and, eventually, to loneliness and despair.
This hole in our hearts is the space from which we call to God. It is the space where God wants most to meet us. Our longing to fill that space comes from God. And it is the space that only God can begin to fill.
Common Longings and Connections
Sometimes you experience a desire for God in very common situations: standing silently in the snowy woods on a winter’s day, finding yourself moved to tears during a movie, recognizing a strange sense of connection during a church service—and feeling an inexpressible longing to savor this feeling and understand what it is.
In the first few years after my sister gave birth to my first nephew, I often felt overwhelmed with love when I was with him. Here was a beautiful new child, a person who had never existed before, given freely to the world. One day I came home from a visit to their house and was so filled with love that I wept—out of gratitude, out of joy, and out of wonder. At the same time, I longed to connect more with this mysterious source of joy.
Common longings and heartfelt connections are ways of becoming conscious of the desire for God. We yearn for an understanding of feelings that seem to come from outside of us. We experience what the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross calls the desire for “I know not what.”
Many of us have had experiences like this. We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder. So why don’t you hear more about these times?
Because many times we ignore them, reject them, or deny them. We chalk them up to being overwhelmed, overwrought, overly emotional. “Oh, I was just being silly!” you might say to yourself. Or we are not encouraged or invited to talk about them as spiritual experiences. So you disregard that longing you feel when the first breath of a spring breeze caresses your face after a long dark winter, because you tell yourself (or others tell you) that you were simply being emotional.