The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

we are not restful creatures who sometimes get restless, fulfilled people who sometimes are dissatisfied, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet. Rather, we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet but into their opposite. Why?

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.

Likewise for Augustine, when he says: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”3 Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.

there are still some major misunderstandings about the concept. Chief among these is the idea that spirituality is, somehow, exotic, esoteric, and not something that issues forth from the bread and butter of ordinary life.

on the fringes and something optional. Rarely is spirituality understood as referring to something vital and nonnegotiable lying at the heart of our lives.

Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality.

And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world.

A saint is someone who can, precisely, channel powerful eros in a creative, life-giving way.

Every choice is a renunciation.

Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world.

And can we see too from all of this that a healthy spirit or a healthy soul must do dual jobs: It has to give us energy and fire, so that we do not lose our vitality, and all sense of the beauty and joy of living.

Thus, the opposite of a spiritual person is not a person who rejects the idea of God and lives as a pagan. The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, is to have lost all zest for living—lying on a couch, watching football or sit-coms, taking beer intravenously!

Its other task, and a very vital one it is, is to keep us glued together, integrated, so that w...

Under this aspect, the opposite of a spiritual person would be someone who has lost his or her identity, namely, the person who at a certain poin...

A healthy soul keeps us both energized and ...

Our soul is not something that we have, it is more something we are. It is the very life-pulse within us, that which makes us alive.

First of all, it is the principle of energy. Life is energy. There is only one body that does not have any energy or tension within it, a dead one.

But the soul does more than merely give energy. It is also the adhesive that holds us together, the principle of integration and individuation within us. The soul not only makes us alive, it also makes us a one. At the physical level this is easy to see. Our bodies, considered biologically, are simply an aggregate of chemicals.

A healthy soul, therefore, must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest, and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately, beautiful and worth living. Whenever this breaks down in us, something is wrong with our souls. When cynicism, despair, bitterness, or depression paralyze our energy, part of the soul is hurting. Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this.

healthy soul, therefore, must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest, and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately, beautiful and worth living. Whenever this breaks down in us, something is wrong with our souls.

Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this.

Desire is working in each case, sometimes blindly and sometimes consciously. St. Paul would say that, in each instance, the Holy Spirit is trying to pray through something or somebody.

There is a discontent, another word for soul and spirit, in all things and what those things, or persons, do with that discontent is their spirituality.

At a very basic level, long before anything explicitly religious need be mentioned, it is true to say that if we do things which keep us energized and integrated, on fire and yet glued together, we have a healthy spirituality.

Conversely, if our yearning drives us into actions which harden our insides or cause us to fall apart and die then we have an unhealthy spirituality.

Spirituality is about what we do with that incurable desire, the madness that comes ...

They simply had less trouble believing in God and in connecting basic human desire to the quest for God and to the obedience that God demands.

The struggles in spirituality that are more unique to our age might be named as follows: Naivete about the nature of spiritual energy, pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness, and a critical problem with balance, leading to a bevy of divorces.

unhealthy. The premoderns understood, however flawed that understanding, not just what the Bible means when it says that we have a jealous God, but also what it means when it says: “No one can see God and live!” What this meant for them is that energy, especially creative energy which contains the sexual, must have some mediation, some filters, and some taboos surrounding it or it will destroy us. On its own, it is too raw, too demanding, too powerful.

Put more simply, we can look at how they handled their spiritual and erotic energies and consider them legalistic and uptight, but their families and communities held together better than do our own and they were less restless and slept more peacefully than we do because all those high symbols and restrictions, whatever their dysfunctions, taught them that they were immortal beings, created in God’s image, whose every action, however private, was important.

What this means is that, all on our own, outside of the classical social and ecclesial taboos, we invariably fluctuate between being out of touch with the deep source of energy, depression, and not being able to properly contain it, inflation.

The opposite of depression is delight, being spontaneously surprised by the goodness and beauty of living.

This is what it would mean to not be depressed: Imagine yourself on some ordinary weekday, walking to your car, standing at a bus stop, cooking a meal, sitting at your desk, or doing anything else that is quite ordinary. Suddenly, for no tangible reason, you fill with a sense of the goodness and beauty and joy of just living. You feel your own life—your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to—and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: “God, it feels great to be alive!” That’s delight, that’s what it means not to be depressed.

The balance we are all searching for lies in a proper relationship to energy, especially creative, erotic, spiritual energy—and these are one and the same thing. Spirituality is about finding the proper ways, disciplines, by which to both access that energy and contain it.

Our age, in its struggle to grow up and to grow beyond what it considers the rather infantile and legalistic approach to this in the past, has naively begun to believe that we in fact understand this energy, that we can control it, and that we need little, if any, external help in coping with it. This naivete is, to my mind, one of the major spiritual stumbling blocks of our time.

Channeling eros correctly is not, first and foremost, about sin and morality, it is about whether or not, like those Ontario couples, we sit in delight or depression while eating our suppers at night.

Spirituality is about properly handling the fires, those powerful energies, that flow through us. We struggle because we are naive and underestimate both the origins and the power of this fire. We think that energy is ours, and it is not. We think we can, all on our own, control it, and we cannot. There is a madness in us that comes from the god and unless we respect and relate it precisely to its divine source we will forever be either too restless or too depressed to ever fully enjoy life or we will be some miniversion of David Koresh, convinced that we are God.

We think that energy is ours, and it is not.

today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever. The air we breathe today is generally not conducive to interiority and depth.

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience,

There is no limit to rich analysis on this: Thomas Merton once said that the biggest spiritual problem of our time is efficiency, work, pragmatism; by the time we keep the plant running there is little time and energy for anything else.

It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

healthy balance, in anything, is not the strength of our age. Invariably we split things up and pit elements against each other. This is especially true spiritually.

One of the critical problems of our age is that we have created a bevy of divorces within spirituality, forcing ourselves and others to have to make unhealthily choices.

THE DIVORCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND EROS Among all the false choices facing us today, none are more harmful to us spiritually, whether we are in a church or not, than is the choice we often make, however unconsciously, between religion and eros.

THE DIVORCE BETWEEN SPIRITUALITY AND ECCLESIOLOGY A strange thing is happening in the Western world today. As the numbers of persons participating in our churches is dramatically decreasing, the numbers of persons interested in spirituality is proportionately increasing. We are witnessing a drastic decline in church life right in the midst of a spiritual renaissance. What is happening?

THE DIVORCE BETWEEN PRIVATE MORALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Ernst Kaseman, the renowned Scripture scholar, once commented that what is wrong in the world and in the churches is that the pious aren’t liberal and the liberals aren’t pious. He is right and that, in caption, names another tragic divorce that has taken place within spirituality and within Western culture in general—private and social morality are too rarely found within the same person.

Too rare is the case where we see together in the same person, the same ideology, the same group, or the same church, an equal passion for social justice and for private morality, for action as for contemplation, and for statecraft (politics) as for soul-craft (mysticism).

d. THE DIVORCE OF THE GIFTED CHILD AND THE GIVING ADULT Spirituality is ultimately about self-transcendence, altruism, and selflessness. Religion has always made this its centerpiece. To be religiously mature was to be a person who freely gives his or her life away. As Jesus put it: “No greater love has one than to lay down one’s life for a friend.”17 While that is obviously true, the way it has been preached has sometimes been problematic. What looks like selflessness can actually be self-serving and manipulative and what looks like a free gift can have strings attached. True selflessness is not so easy to define.