conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

eternal echoes: one

Your longing [to belong] is the Divine Longing in human form.
-John O'Donohue

A congregant from CCW passed along a copy of Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong by John O'Donohue. I started reading it last night and only a dozen pages in I can tell that this is going to be one intense ride. I'll be posting on it from time to time as I have other books (Sabbath, Blue Like Jazz, and Celebration of Discipline) on this blog. I hope that you all find it interesting. It's a dense piece of work, so there will be quite a few posts. Let me start with the prologue here.

The author starts off by reminding us just how rare community is these days, or at least if it is not rare it is more and more challenging to find or create. Our usual institutions (the village, the church, the synagogue etc) are no longer the principal loci for community as they once were. We are fragmented people. He also reminds us that the internet is not true community. Again, I could not disagree more, but that's me. I want to nuance his point of view there, but we'll see how it pans out in the book first.

Last week in my sermon I reminded us that the scriptures tell us that we love because God first loved. The act of Creation itself is an act of love. God's ruach, God's breath poured out over the deep (chaos, that fragmented or colluded mess - yes both) was an act of love. O'Donohue states that it was also an act of longing. God first longed. The Divine Longing is echoed in our own ongoing longing for community.

Note: This is not an academic work with footnotes and such. I say that so those of you who read this blog don't expect me to be academic. It's good ol' poetic spiritual stuff here. Be warned. No footnotes! The book is "a poetic and speculative exploration of the creative tension between longing and belonging."

So, that being said, I'm going to keep reading.

"Why do we long to belong?" asks the author. Well, because we remember deep in our bones the divine sense of completeness, of belonging. That is the divinity within us remembering itself. The quotation above is how O'Donohue expresses it. There is a desire to bridge the gap between isolation and intimacy, our uniqueness (individuality) and shared common life (community). We live in the tension, he suggests, and it can be a great force of creativity or it can crush us. In either case, it is spiritually unhealthy to ignore it.

I'm going to keep reading and post from time to time. I'll let you know how it goes. If you have read this book, let me know your thoughts. He's written others that have proven to be quite popular as well. This should be an interesting ride.

The question I have rattling around in my head is whether or not church, for example, is the answer to the longing or if church is simply the place that helps us to navigate the tension so that our lives can be fruitful and creative. My guess is the answer is yes, both. It all depends on who you are. We'll see. O'Donohue suggests that "spiritual friendship" is key to filling this need. And he is wise enough to say that it doesn't have to come from a singular community...as we simply don't function that way any longer. Perhaps we never have.

Maybe I misunderstand him. I'll keep at it and let you know.

Posted by tripp at May 19, 2009 07:31 AM