Sacred Pause: What is this longing?

by Lisa Olson

"What would satisfy me? My desires seem endless. I want, I want, I want – food, sex, entertainment, fame, money, gadgets. I fill my life with things that excite me for a moment. Catalogues come in the mail and I look for something new to desire. I am always wanting. No matter how much I get, I never seem to be satisfied. I am stuffed but insatiable.” – Sam Keen

If the UPS man could come every day, it would be so great. I don't know what i enjoy more, the anticipation of a package coming, or the actual opening of the package. The sound of the UPS truck brakes, squealing promisingly in front of my house: he's here for me, for me, he's got something for me. And on days when he doesn't come, I can comfortably fall back on the anticipation. The knowing, the knowing, that there is something coming, just for me, any day now.

It's strange and funny the things we hook ourselves into, the ways we get through our days, the sad and silly ways we find hope and promise, the ways we fill the hole.

There's something about knowing that something is coming that always gets me through, that keeps me alive, something to look forward to, something to open. The smell of a cardboard box upon slicing it open, the feel of a crisp new book in my hands, the book, oh here it is! THIS is the book I've waited for all my life.

Anticipation is one of my favorite past-times, one of my most beloved ways to escape. One day not so long ago, I reached out for the sweet distraction of anticipation, up in my head. Looking for what I once had heard aptly called a 'pocket': One of the most common ways we ditch ourselves, the intensity of our emotions or the plain old mundanity of our days is to hide out in our heads, to find a pocket up there to tuck ourselves into. Fantasies of what we should have done, replays of the past, anticipations of the future, conversations that we've never had, you name it.

On this particular day, I looked for the pocket that would provide me with comfort in thinking about my next package, that would give me a little swig of endorphins, a small jolt of an anticipatory high. I thought for a moment about what I had coming. Suddenly, I had a harsh and most uncomfortable realization.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, there was nothing coming. Nothing at all. No packages, no pending orders, no books, not even any magazines until the following month, there was nothing coming for me. It was a hollow, desperate feeling. It was one of the saddest moments of my life. There's nothing coming, the truth sunk in like emptiness, the words replayed like school yard mockery. There's nothing coming to save me. There's nothing coming.

Deliver me from emptiness. Sometimes it's not evil I need delivery from. it's just the dull ache of my own emptiness. Can I be with this emptiness? And what is this emptiness really, but a longing for God? So much of our lives are spent in longing. So we grab at what we can, failing, again and again to realize that what we long for is not only within our reach, but deeply residing within us, waiting for us to simply behold it, turn toward it. But that requires slipping into the caverns sometimes, or quieting ourselves long enough to really hear, and what we hear might not be what we want to hear. We are afraid to stare at the sun, because someone told us we would go blind. Some of us don't masturbate for the very same reason. Can't say I've ever been worried about that, but I know how to avoid truth with a comfy false belief.

I think that all longings are the longing for God. Whether we long for affection, attention, drugs, alcohol, love, money, stuff, whatever, when we strip down the longing to the hollow, hallowed center, it is emptiness, and it is longing for the Divine.

I am learning to recognize longing for what it really is when it shows up in my life. I am learning to understand longing as a desire to connect with the Beloved within. I am learning that emptiness is a talisman that tells me I've disconnected. I am learning to not go running for instant relief from anything that feels uncomfortable. I am no expert. But I am learning. It's a practice, something I must return to again and again, when the reflex-like impulse to react, to hide, to numb out shows up. I am learning to be with the emptiness. Like any practice, it gets easier the more I practice it. To stay with my emptiness, and not run to fill it, that is something I am only just beginning to experiment with.

I am learning to see that the longing, too, is God.