Unspoken Longing

"You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling(but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul,. the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."-C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain.

I came across this quote in The Sacred Romance. This is something I have felt very often. It's something that, as he says, is impossible to communicate. You sometimes meet people and you can tell they've had the same experience, but even then you're almost unable to talk about it.

I would posit that this is a description of experiencing God and God's story. Not just the "emotional high" type of experiencing God, but experiencing God as storyteller. As Holy. Holy is an interesting word, but when it comes down to it, it basically means, in reference to God, "like God". It's rather self-referential. So, getting a taste of God as God is, in contrast to who we've conceived God to be.

This evening at care group I was reminded of my experiences with God like this. Reminded of the story that I get glimpses of being played out in my life and the lives of others.

Over the years of pain and beauty, I have many times sensed a deep longing for I-knew-not-what. As I said in a poem I wrote, 

"[This something] is gold! sapphires! diamonds!
But more, and with exquisite flavor, smell, texture.

Yet this something eludes me.
Like a smell I once knew.
Like a memory just out of my grasp.
Like a hint of melody that I cannot place."

I still cannot put it into words at all well, but I know WHO this something comes from, and who can satisfy this "incommunicable and unappeasable want." For that I am very thankful. 

I'm kinda looking forward to the rest of my life searching for, getting tastes of, hearing the echoes of that which will truly satisfy me. The epic poem that is happening all around me. I can name it as "God as God is and God's purpose in reality" but it will take a lifetime and more to learn what that means.

Following Jesus is much more than just being right, or doing the right things, it's about getting to know, being known by, and falling in love with God as God is. And that is a frightfully exciting thought.