There is something in my heart, much, much older than me, it feels. Like many, I mistook it for a particular part of the world, once. At times it seemed like the ocean, or the way the sun goes through the clouds in some skies, or a single, perfect tree, in its summer and spring array, above a forest into blue. The yearning for my childhood, sometimes, or the feeling one gets when one is barefoot in the grass on a summer’s day before a storm.
I didn’t really become conscious of this thing until I was fifteen or so, and, on the advice of a friend, I went for (my first intentional!) walk into the deepest nature I could find near my house... I still remember the sight. It was early fall, and the leaves were still fresh and falling in many colours on the ground and on the path. But it was what was off the path that caught my eye. I was gazing at this and that as I walked, and then, looking up, I beheld it through the foliage—a fallen tree, in a patch of sunlight, probably created by the death of its own branches; yet propped up over a little hill; and the sunlight was like heaven falling down, and I desired to climb the tree,—strangely—and get as high up, as close to the source of that sun, as possible. My breath caught, and I felt my eyes sting; I ran to it, I scrambled up it, alone there in the woods, and bruised myself, but carried on, and reached the top, as high as I might go, and still the light was around me and not for me, everywhere and uncapturable; and I began to sob with wild abandon, and I descended and had to sit beneath a tree. The leaves were still falling, and as I regained my senses, I thought, “Yet somehow I did reach paradise... look at this around me; is this not what they call God?”
I thought little more of it then, but stood still in bliss for some minutes, before going on my way. The moment passed, but the memory of it has never passed, and even as I tell it to you a great emotion wells up in me and seizes me,... Such beauty, such undeniable beauty...
There were a few more moments like that, yes, few, and far between. There was another time in the same woods, one summer, when at the bottom of a hill I became conscious of the light pouring in from the top, and realized I was lost, and realized that I did not know what was beyond it, and wanted desperately to see it. My breath is coming in snatches now.—Again I ran; I ran up the hill, through broken sticks and over stones, desperate to get over it; and as I later described to the one I love, “Somehow I thought God was over that hill. And somehow I thought ... Heaven is there; and I am ready. I give up everything, all my possessions, all my feelings, and health, and the people, for what is over that hill.” Pardon me: I am crying. I stumbled over the ridge, and... Not much was there. A little bit of undergrowth, more forest, some rugged patches. Nothing I did not have at the bottom. I went away in silence. Yet shortly after, as I paused to breathe, the feeling snuck up on me. The great burst of Longing, which was to me as Heaven. Did I not say, “Surely God was there”?
Or there was another time, as I was mowing the lawn at someone’s house by a field, and there was a little hummock I had not noticed; over it hung a giant tree, through whose spring leaves fell such sunsetting twilight as ever anyone wanted, and I pushed the mower absentmindedly toward it, and bordering it was a broken-down wooden fence, and beyond it, a vast and open field, all covered in gold, waving, waving gold, and I stopped and stared, mouth open in anguish. I loved that anguish.
These times became further and further apart, and I thought of them less and less. By and by it came to be that when I experienced it, I thought to tell someone when I got home, but by the time I did get back I had already forgotten it. It escaped my reach. Lately other things, these things I mentioned to you, began to take over, particularly my childhood and the idea of my innocence now wizened. But it too yielded nothing, and could yield nothing. What would I have done even if it had been the most perfect location I was brought to, by any of these things? Sat there? Admired it? Wished I was elsewhere? No; none of these things were really it.
There is no place one can go to that satisfies it. There is a desire, a painful and sweet desire. I said to the one I love, “This sorrow I feel—it is almost like joy; it is pure emotion; I feel sure it is greater than joy or sorrow, and I only have no name for it.” This desire, perhaps a need, comes to life at certain sights, and sometimes sounds and smells and touches, and for some people, tastes. But when have they ever gone to the thing they saw, listened to the music on its own, found the source of the smell, or held what they wished, that it stayed that way forever? For me, it never, never stayed, even for an instant. Only one thing did: the longing, and the feeling that something else existed beyond, which somehow I attained not in the getting, but in the longing itself. Having was wanting; and wanting was having.
(That is also what I felt, in one of these moments, today. I was biking in the cool, fragrant air—there are many sweet-smelling trees around here—and the sun broke a cloud and spilt it all over a forest scene, playing it over the river, and I was forced to stop moving and stop breathing. That is why I am so happy now.)
As C.S. Lewis said, “If we consider our natures so that nothing is there without reason—which is plausible in theism, deism, and atheism; everything but chaosism—if we have a desire that nothing on Earth can fill, the most likely explanation is that it is not Earth we were made for.”
Indeed, I have tried to fill it with so much. Many people do. With reading, writing, music, sexuality, gaming, the idea of the nature walk itself; with depression, which was convincing because it felt so close to that original sorrow, though in reality was nothing like it; with friends, summer days, intellectualism, fine cuisine, the development of a strong and healthy body, and everything else. Romance was the greatest killer for me, and it supported many of those others, too. For some people it’s gambling, for others wealth, for others perfectionism; thank goodness I am not gifted with any talent in any of those. But nothing lasts, and nothing, when I have it, is what I thought it would be, or does for me what I thought it would. It is all a falling-through.
Yet there is some enjoyment in it. This is the enjoyment I feel when I have heard of a new thing, and am going to pursue it: when I decide I may find What I’m Looking For in it. Between hearing of it and having it, I want it; and I think many people would agree that this is the sweetest part of the whole affair, the thinking one will get, one will have—in future, one will be.
How then shall I keep chasing after these things, when I have seen and understood that what I really desire is desire itself? And how is it that I can long after this longing? How is it so much better than whatever I find on Earth?—It is perhaps from something higher; for the best thing is to have That Which Is On High, and the next best is to Know Of It (even subconsciously) and to Seek It. The worst of all is to live in our current unfulfilling world, and say that good rests in it; to be a swine far from pearls.
I will thus seek that which I know must be the only thing that /can/ fulfil this desire, and give up seeking all else: I mean if I can, I will. I will try to. If there is nothing there, at least I will have stopped wasting my time trying to fill this Hole with more nothing. And if there is something there, this is the only way, God willing, that I shall at least find what I seek, and call it God.
