Thought for the week: Neil Morgan is long sighted
‘What if our task is to stay in touch with our deepest longings?’
Life, they say, is like a tin of sardines: we are all of us searching for the key. This key may be out of reach, to be discovered, or it may be a key that we once had but have somehow lost.
This introduces us to two ideas: the experience of yearning, or longing, on the one hand; and nostalgia on the other. Both can give us a feeling of discontent. We do not feel ‘at home’. We yearn for something transcendent, something beyond us, which we are travelling towards yet are distant from, as seekers. At other times, we may feel we once had this experience in our grasp, but have become separated. Then finding becomes a re-finding.
In the Augustinian-Platonic worldview, this is the search for a transcendent God, a God of the universals. Plato (in his Meno) linked this to recollection. Of course, Freud’s critique of this search is that it is a repressed wish to capture a feeling of safety under the wings of magic parents. This wish comes in the form of nostalgia (from ‘nostos’, meaning ‘homecoming’, and ‘algos’, meaning ‘pain’).
The Psalmists express the sense of longing in some of the most beautiful and moving passages of Christian literature. Consider Psalm 42: 1-2 as rendered in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’
In our scientistic, materialist age, there is social pressure to relegate spiritual passion to a philosophical and psychological wastebasket. Philosophically, we are told, it does not make sense. Psychologically, it is implied, those who suffer from this love-sickness need counselling. It is a sort of ‘puppy love’, an infatuation, a religious adolescence presupposing a sober secular maturity. We will grow out of it. Perhaps this sense of spiritual longing – of mystery, of the transcendent – is slowly being stripped out of Quaker faith.
The question I want to ask is: Will we grow out of it? Or, if I can be bolder still, should we? What if the Psalmists are right? What if they are describing the most real, the most truthful, state of the human spirit? What if our task is to stay in touch with our deepest longings – to unlearn what we have come to learn as sophisticated grown-ups, and rest in the ineffable mystery of love? To be open to our deepest longings is to risk being aware of what we are, and to be open to what we feel. It is to be deeply human.
Can we stand up for this sense of longing as adults? Or must we defer to Freud and secular culture, admitting to being no more than clingy children?
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