I Only Know That I'm Longing

I write this after spending time at Saint John’s Abbey monastery in Minnesota. As I make my way home I recognize how profoundly “out of step” I am with my usual world. But that is a good thing to experience once in a while. It is often through disengagement that one becomes more aware of the human condition and experience. Being absent from day-to-day routines allows one to be more present to the heart of things. Let me explain.

In my repeated experience with silent retreat, I have come to notice a pattern in myself. At first I love the quiet: I revel in the gift of it all, the freedom to take my time in reading and prayer, the joy of being unhurried with God. It's all so healing — for a day or two — because after that initial bliss, something else begins to happen to me. I begin to sense my soul becoming noisy, anxious, unsure. I feel like an addict coming off their drug of distraction. The bliss I feel at the beginning of retreat gives way to strange and uncomfortable bodily experience. I find that I want to escape myself, the nakedness of my soul too hard to bear.

But if I stay in retreat, stay in my commitment to work this feeling through (and there have been a few times I didn’t), I find myself entering a new place, a new interior unity where my thoughts and feelings and choice agree. I learn what it means to “still and quiet my soul” before God. I learn the purifying joy of waiting for God. And I learn to recognize the deeper longing that lies buried within me, the longing which is usually covered by distraction and busyness. I learn this in the silence.

You perhaps have heard of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who, with her family, hid from the Nazis in a secret Amsterdam apartment during WW2. She is known to us now for the diary she kept, a testimony to what is universal in all of us even though her life was quite removed from the normal and everyday. This is what she wrote on February 12, 1944:

Today the sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I am longing -- so longing for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone. And I do so long… to cry! I feel as if I am going to burst, and I know it would get better with crying; but I can’t, I’m restless, I go from room to room, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, “can you satisfy my longing at last?”

I believe that it is spring within me, I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally. I feel utterly confused. I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing. (cited in Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, p. 78)

Consider the feeling that Anne Frank expresses here, the recognition of longing that I myself have experienced in silent retreat. It's only when we are cut off from regular life for a time, even a few days, that we begin to see it. For Anne, of course, this recognition emerged out of her separation from regular life, a separation that lasted several years, although she lived in close quarters with a few others and was never physically alone. Still, her great recognition was to recognize what was unfulfilled in her, what was incomplete, and what she deeply longed for. That recognition, I would say, was a kind of joy in itself. It was the essence of hope, whether or not she would call it that.

To recognize the heart of our deep longing is to create a space for God. It is holy ground. When all of our cheap substitutes fall away, all we are left with is the pure desire to truly live, to be free and happy, to love and be loved. And that is what I take from these days of silent retreat. I have rested, prayed, read, and worshipped. But reflecting on this time, there are no better words than what Anne wrote years ago: “I only know that I am longing.”