The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

This is a book for you if you are struggling spiritually.

And many good, sincere persons struggle today with their faith and with their churches. Lots of things contribute to this: the pluralism of an age which is rich in everything, except clarity; the individualism of a culture which makes family and community life difficult at every level; an anti-church sentiment within both popular culture and the intellectual world; an ever-growing antagonism between those who see religion in terms of private prayer and piety and those who see it as the quest for justice; and a seeming tiredness right within the Christian churches themselves. It is not an easy time to be a Christian, especially if you are also trying to pass your faith on to your own children.

A comment is in order too regarding the language and the style of the book: I have tried to use as simple a language as possible. First, because the spiritual writer who most influenced our generation, Henri Nouwen, used to re-write his books over and over again to try to make them simpler. That, it seems to me, is the ideal.

Second, I belong to a religious congregation, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, whose charisma it is to serve the poor. The poor have many faces and there are many kinds of poverty. To serve the poor also means to try to make the word of God and God’s consolation available in a language that is accessible to everyone and not just to those who have the privilege of advanced academic training.

What Is Spirituality?

Both women’s and men’s groups are constantly speaking of a certain wild energy that we need to access and understand more fully. Thus, women’s groups talk about the importance of running with wolves and men’s groups speak of wild men’s journeys and of having fire in the belly. New Age gurus chart the movement of the planets and ask us to get ourselves under the correct planets or we will have no peace.

Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing—an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions. It does however admit of different moods and faces.

Sometimes it hits us as pain—dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching. At other times its grip is not felt as painful at all, but as a deep energy, as something beautiful, as an inexorable pull, more important than anything else inside us, toward love, beauty, creativity, and a future beyond ...

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 ...

What Is Spirituality? Few words are as misunderstood in the contemporary English language as is the word spirituality.

Thus, for example, if one went to an English library and checked the titles of books, he or she would find that, save for a few exceptions, the word spirituality appears in those titles only published within the last three decades.

Today there are books on spirituality everywhere. However, despite the virtual explosion of literature in the area, in the Western world today, especially in the secular world, 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. Thus, for many people, the term spirituality conjures up images of something paranormal, mystical, churchy, holy, pious, otherworldly, New Age, something on the fringes and something optional. Rarely is spirituality understood as referring to something vital and nonnegotiable lying at the heart of our lives.

None of us has a choice. 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.

We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.

Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us.

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.

Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul’s journey with the words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.”6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.

Thus, to offer a striking example of how spirituality is about how one handles his or her eros, let us compare the lives of three famous women: Mother Teresa, Janis Joplin, and Princess Diana.

A saint is someone who can, precisely, channel powerful eros in a creative, life-giving way. Søren Kierkegaard once defined a saint as someone who can will the one thing.

Looking at Janis Joplin, the rock star who died from an overdose of life at age twenty-seven, few would consider her a very spiritual woman. Yet she was one. People think of her as the opposite of Mother Teresa, erotic, but not spiritual. Yet Janis Joplin was not so different from Mother Teresa, at least not in raw makeup and character. She was also an exceptional woman, a person of fiery eros, a great lover, a person with a rare energy. Unlike Mother Teresa, however, Janis Joplin could not will the one thing.

In her case, as is tragically often the case in gifted artists, the end result, at least in this life, was not a healthy integration but a dissipation. She, at a point, simply lost the things that normally glue a human person together and broke apart under too much pressure.

Medieval philosophy had a dictum that said: Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many others. To marry one person is to not marry all the others, to have a baby means to give up certain other things; and to pray may mean to miss watching television or visiting with friends. This makes choosing hard.

Wow

Most of us, I suspect, are a bit more like Princess Diana—half-Mother Teresa, half Janis Joplin.

Spirituality is about how we channel our eros. In Princess Diana’s attempts to do this, we see something most of us can identify with, a tremendous complexity, a painful struggle for choice and commitment, and an oh-so-human combination of sins and virtues.

Thus, we can define spirituality this way: 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.

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 we do not fall apart and die. 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 point does not know who he or she is anymore. A healthy soul keeps us both energized and glued together.

What is a soul?

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.

As such it has two functions: 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. The soul is what gives life. Inside it, lies the fire, the eros, the energy that drives us. Thus we are alive as long as there is a soul in our bodies and we die the second it leaves the body.

However, as long as we are alive, have a soul within us, all of these chemicals work together to form a single organism, a body, within which all the separate chemicals and all the processes they produce work together to make a oneness, a single thing which is greater than the simple combination of all its parts. We call this a body and every body depends for its existence upon a soul.

To lose one’s soul is to become, in contemporary jargon, unglued. To lose one’s soul is to fall apart. Hence, when I feel my inner world hopelessly crumpling, when I do not know who I am anymore, and when I am trying to rush off in all directions at the same time but do not know where I am going, then I am losing my soul.

This, as much as the question of eternity, is what Jesus meant when he asked: “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his or her own soul?”

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. When we stand looking at ourselves, confus...

Every healthy spirituality, therefore, will have to worship at two shrines: the shrines of the God of chaos and the God of order.

Is this or that particular experience healthy or unhealthy for me right now? Given this background, we see that the question of what makes our souls healthy or unhealthy is very complex because, on any given day, we might need more integration rather than energy, or vice versa.

It is for this reason, that the elements of fire and water have always been so central in religious symbolism. Fire symbolizes energy, eros, passion. Water symbolizes a cooling down, a holding in containment, a womb of safety.

They believed in God easily, but then struggled with superstition, slavery, sexism, unhealthy notions of fate and predestination, excessive fears of eternal punishment, and legalism. They also, at different times, burned witches, waged religious wars, slaughtered innocent people while thinking themselves on a crusade for Christ, forbade scientists to look through telescopes, and, further back still, sacrificed humans, mainly children, on altars. Every generation has struggled spiritually. There has been no golden age.

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.

First, they would always try to understand that energy as coming from God and as ultimately directed back toward God. Hence, they surrounded religious and sexual energy, desire, with very high symbols. Where we use biological and psychological symbols, they used theological ones; for example, where we look at desire and speak of being horny or being obsessed, they spoke of “eternal longings” and “hunger for the bread of life.” Desire was always understood against an infinite horizon.

Fascinating

Second, to try to contain the imperialistic nature of spiritual and erotic energy, they placed around desire a lot of taboos, prohibitions, and strict laws. At its most basic level, long before any taboos and prohibitions were ever named and codified, the idea here was simply that, as a human being, you were meant to genuflect before a God, that is, to bow beneath and put your will beneath the holiness and will of God.

Unlike Jung, we consider it friendly, as something we need not fear and as something we can manage all on our own, without the help of a God or of external rules and taboos. In fact, we tend to disdain any external force, religious or secular, that would in any way censor or restrict an absolute freedom to let energy flow through us. Obedience and genuflection are not very popular. We want to manage energy all on our own.

As C. S. Lewis suggests in the title of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, delight has to catch us unaware, at a place where we are not rationalizing that we are happy.

In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.

— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality https://a.co/3QbkCIW

We are right in one way, erotic energy is good, there is nothing wrong with Aphrodite and Eros having sex under a tree. What is problematic is that this is not an event meant to be watched. It is too raw. Love is meant to be made behind closed doors.

That is precisely what happens in a religious cult, as can be seen in what happened to David Koresh and his followers in Waco and to the members of the Solar Temple cult in Switzerland and Canada. It is no mere accident that, so often, people in cults die and that they die by fire. Spiritual energy is fire, the hottest fire of all, and people who too naively play with that fire get burned.

Spirituality is about properly handling the fires, those powerful energies, that flow through us.

2. Pathological Busyness, Distraction, and Restlessness

Jan Walgrave once commented that our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.9 What he meant is not that there is somewhere a conscious conspiracy against proper values, the churches, and true spirituality, as paranoid conservatism likes to believe. What he meant was that, 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.

Narcissism accounts for our heartaches, pragmatism for our headaches, and restlessness for our insomnia. And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.

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.