Longing

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you... the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both... it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

This brief quote does not do justice to C S Lewis’ concept of ‘Sweet Desire’, which he describes as an intense longing for something that we have not as yet experienced.

Something about this season of Advent on which we have now started speaks to me of this longing, this yearning for something that cannot be defined or described, because we have not yet experienced or encountered it.

It is that sense of there being ‘something more’, another place or experience that we vaguely discern but know that we have never experienced or encountered... so far. So we long for this ‘yet to be and yet to come’ state or place.

Is it perhaps this we see in the Old Testament prophets as they looked for and longed for the coming of Messiah and the ushering in of the Messianic realm? Is it what the elderly Anna and Simeon were awaiting as they kept their long watch in the Temple until they encountered the infant Jesus?

In the music West Side Story, Tony sings the song ‘Something’s Coming’.

                ‘It’s only just out of reach,

                 Down the block,

on a beach,

under a tree...’

It is that sense that something is coming, but it is just beyond our physical, mental or emotional grasp... but perhaps not quite beyond our spiritual grasp?

And we long for it.

I felt that inner pang this morning, perhaps in part because when I looked out on the winter scene here at Nethy Bridge (photo above) where we are having a short break, I felt that strange longing / desire / pang within, and partly because it is the beginning of Advent when we remember the longing of all who looked for the coming of Messiah, and acknowledge our own longing for the coming of his realm of peace and justice... the yearning for that which we can only just discern but not yet fully experience... the reaching out to that which is beyond our grasp, but which we sense is there and is coming.