From the notebooks: Longing
Sep. 10th, 2008 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonDecember 28, 1996
There has to be a place in the Universe which takes all this longing seriously, which draws it in and transforms it into something real. And we should all be able to get there, but we can't. We sit on this side of the glass watching as all of the things we yearn for walk past us. What was God thinking when he created longing? What did he mean us to learn from it? I admit I can't see it.
I have a friend who died, but before he did, he said, "All longing is essentially a desire to return to God, not to be separated from Him any more, to be in the presence of his love. Everything else is just a shadow of that deeper longing."
Except he said it more profoundly. I've blotted out the words, or dramatized them…or something. I haven't gotten them quite right. Maybe what he said was, "All life is suffering, and we are suffering because we are separated from God and longing for Him. When we are reunited with God, we will never long for anything again."
Or maybe he didn't say that, either. Maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I'm longing to hear him again, wishing he had given me some profound statement before he died. Buddha said that, didn't he? He was rather Buddha-like when he died, my friend S. I suppose I'm longing to be reunited with S., not God. Or maybe they're the same thing.
And if S. wasn't already dead, he would have laughed himself to death over that last statement.
There has to be a place in the Universe which takes all this longing seriously, which draws it in and transforms it into something real. And we should all be able to get there, but we can't. We sit on this side of the glass watching as all of the things we yearn for walk past us. What was God thinking when he created longing? What did he mean us to learn from it? I admit I can't see it.
I have a friend who died, but before he did, he said, "All longing is essentially a desire to return to God, not to be separated from Him any more, to be in the presence of his love. Everything else is just a shadow of that deeper longing."
Except he said it more profoundly. I've blotted out the words, or dramatized them…or something. I haven't gotten them quite right. Maybe what he said was, "All life is suffering, and we are suffering because we are separated from God and longing for Him. When we are reunited with God, we will never long for anything again."
Or maybe he didn't say that, either. Maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I'm longing to hear him again, wishing he had given me some profound statement before he died. Buddha said that, didn't he? He was rather Buddha-like when he died, my friend S. I suppose I'm longing to be reunited with S., not God. Or maybe they're the same thing.
And if S. wasn't already dead, he would have laughed himself to death over that last statement.