We live in times of constant activity and excitement. The media present endless images of togetherness, talk shows, and parties. Yet behind all the glossy imagery and activity, there is a haunted lonesomeness at the vacant heart of contemporary life. There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community. It is true that neighbours are not necessarily close to you. They do not need to be friends, but humans who live in clusters with each other are meant to look out for and look after each other, rather than live in such isolation. This is a primal sense of duty. You often notice that when something happens to someone on the street or in the village, neighbours who had never been in the house before come to help and support. In Ireland, this is especially apparent at a time of bereavement. People simply gather around so that you are not left alone with the shock and silence of death. While drawing little attention to itself, this support brings so much healing and shelter. It is something you would never forget, and the beauty is how naturally it happens. During times of suffering, the shelter of belonging calms us. The particular shape of belonging must always strive to meet our longing.
The Voices of Longing
Every human heart is full of longing. You long to be happy, to live a meaningful and honest life, to find love, and to be able to open your heart to someone; you long to discover who you are and to learn how to heal your own suffering and become free and compassionate. To be alive is to be suffused with longing. The voices of longing keep your life alert and urgent. If you cannot discover the shelter of belonging within your life, you could become a victim and target of your longing, pulled hither and thither without any anchorage anywhere. It is consoling that each of us lives and moves within the great embrace of the earth. You can never fall out of the shelter of this belonging. Part of the reason that we are so lonesome in our modern world is that we have lost the sense of belonging on the earth.
If you were a stone, you could remain still, gathered in silent witness in the same landscape. The infinite horizons would never trouble you. Nothing could draw you out. As a human, your daily experience is riven with fracture and fragmentation. You wander like a nomad from event to event, from person to person, unable to settle anywhere for too long. The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted. A day is over, and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent. Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk. A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given. You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts. When you wake from your obsessions, you feel cheated. Your longing is being numbed, and your belonging becoming merely external. Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.
I was once at a wedding at which an incident occurred; in fact, it was more an event. The wedding breakfast was over, and the music had begun. An older woman was there. She was a quiet person who kept to herself, a shy country woman who was invited because she was a next-door neighbour of the bride. Everyone knew that her husband was an upright person, but mean and controlling. They suspected that she had a very hard life with him. There always seemed to be a sadness around her. Though he was quite wealthy, she never seemed to have anything new to wear. She had married young in a culture and at a time when if you made a huge mistake in your choice of partner, there was no way out. You continued to lie on your bed of thorns and put a face on things for the neighbours. At the wedding, she began to have a few drinks. She had never drunk alcohol before, and it was not long until the veneer of control and reservation began to fall away. The music was playing but there was no one dancing. She got up and danced on her own. It was a wild dance. It seemed that the music had got inside her and set her soul at large. She was oblivious of everyone. She took the full space of the floor and used it. She danced in movements that mixed ballet and rock. Everyone stood back, watching her, in silence. Her poor dance was lonesome, the fractured movements, the coils of gesture, unravelling in the air. Yet there was something magical happening in it too. Often there is a greater kindness in gesture. Here she was dancing out thirty years of captive longing. The façade of social belonging was down. The things she could never say to anyone came flooding out in her dance. In rhythm with the music, the onlookers began to shout encouragement. She did not even seem to hear them; she was dancing. When the music stopped, she returned to her table blushing, but holding her head high. Her eyes were glad, and there was a smile beginning around the corners of her mouth.
The Feeling That Something Is Missing
The human heart is inhabited by many different longings. In its own voice, each one calls to your life. Some longings are easily recognized, and the direction in which they call you is clear. Other voices are more difficult to decipher. At different times of your life, they whisper to you in unexpected ways. It can take years before you are able to hear where exactly they want to call you. Beneath all these is a longing that has somehow always been there and will continue to accompany every future moment of your life. It is a longing that you will never be able to clearly decipher, though it will never cease to call you. At times, it will bring you to tears; at other times, it will set your heart wild. No person you meet will ever quell it. You can be at one with the love of your life, give all of your heart, and it will still continue to call you. In quiet moments in your love, even at moments of intimacy that feel like an absolute homecoming, a whisper of this longing will often startle you. It may prod you into unease and make you question your self and your ability to love and to open yourself to love. Even when you achieve something that you have worked for over the years, the voice of this longing will often surface and qualify your achievement. When you listen to its whisper, you will realize that it is more than a sense of anti-climax. Even when everything comes together and you have what you want, this unwelcome voice will not be stifled.
What voice is this? Why does it seep with such unease into our happiness? Deep down in each of us is a huge desire to belong. Without a sense of belonging, we are either paralyzed or utterly restless. Naturally, when you enter lovely times of belonging, you would love to anchor and rest there. At such times your heart settles. You feel you have arrived, you relax and let your self belong with all your heart. Then, the voice whispers and your belonging is disturbed. The voice always makes you feel that something is missing. Even when everything you want is on your table, and everyone you love is there in your life, you still feel something is missing. You are not able to name what is missing. If you could, you might be able to go somewhere to get it, but you cannot even begin. Something that feels vital to you lies out of your reach in the unknown. The longing to fill this absence drives some people out of the truth and shelter of love; they begin a haunted journey on a never-ending path in quest of the something that is missing. Others seek it in the accumulation of possessions. Again this small voice leads other people into the quest for the divine.