A CALL TO COMMUNION | PART 3
This week, for my final entry on communion, we will take a slight detour exploring how longing and belonging ties back to communion.
No one of us, as well as the entire creation, is created to exist in isolation. Rather, we are created to belong. Isolation, no, but, solitude, yes. Solitude enhances community and paves the road to communion which is a lifeline for the soul. True solitude originates from the place of need to belong and to commune while isolation rejects the very notion of the need.
John O’Donohue speaks insightfully, “Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy.”
Henri Nouwen speaks of a movement from “a desert of loneliness to a garden of solitude.”
Isolation creates a desert of loneliness. Loneliness is a symptom of heightened modern isolation. Solitude is an act of longing to belong. In our day and age, materialism and consumerism have aided individualism to deeper isolation and have blinded and dulled us to the need to belong. Our heart does not and will not know how to rest until it finds belonging. “The heart is an eternal nomad,” writes O’Donohue.
The problem is we have learned to long and belong to “things” thinking that they would satisfy our eternal desire when in fact, our heart ultimately is looking for love. Love is the only gift that true belonging can bestow, and our heart will know. When we find love, everything else fades away. One characteristic of the sanctification journey is to chase away and reject “wrong” longings while continuing to say “yes” to the eternal Longing this world does not understand or value.
The restless eternal longing is the longing after both God and for ourselves. This is the same longing. This longing after God and for ourselves (as in discovering our true selves) is generated by none other than love. Love is the source of our search for Ultimate Longing and for ourselves. This then naturally translates into true longing for others as well as being that longing for others—all toward generating love and intimacy. Our life lives a life of belonging, belonging to God, to self, and to others.
One of the better books on the topic of belonging is John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes. He writes, “The word ‘belonging’ holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: Being and Longing, the longing of our Being and the being of our Longing.”
COMMUNION + BELONGING…
What O’Donohue calls belonging and what Merton calls communion are almost identical. Our life is ultimately created to belong and to be in union with God, ourselves, with others, and with the entire creation.
Communion and belonging are inseparable, really. Pursuing belonging will lead to communion; pursuing communion will put belonging in its rightful place. The longing to belong is an ancient and eternal God-given gift. We mistakenly think it is “our” longing, but it is God’s longing working in us. Without it, there is no homing device for us to find true home, to Ultimate Longing who is the triune God.
As we learn to exercise and practice belonging with others and the creation, we are awakened to deeper Ultimate Belonging. This is an upward spiral movement.
Nature often unlocks our soul’s longing. When our heart and mind find rest being out in certain settings of nature in solitude, we realize that our soul’s at rest and allow us to declutter our mind and heart to discover what our true longing is. Over time every tyranny fades away and every callus softens, and being out in nature brings uncanny focus into what truly matters or what we long for in our soul. This is a unique contribution of Celtic spirituality that opens up nature to be God’s open sanctuary to discover our soul’s true and unique colors and songs and dances. Nature gifts us with tranquility and has the ability to declutter our messy modern mind that sides with objectivism and ignores our soul’s language which comes to us in symbols, flashes of intuition, and/or still small voices.
When Merton speaks of “symbols” it is confirmed by voices from our soul thus leading to a deeper mode of knowing, communion.
Our soul’s voices are essentially our authentic and eternal longings which were programmed and created by God.
Our longings validate the fact that we are pilgrims on the journey of discovering our true selves for our own sake and for the sake of the world.