Compassion is another such quiet virtue. There is a huge crisis of compassion in contemporary society. This crisis has nothing to do with our inability to feel sympathy for others. It has more to do with the numbing of our compassion because of our image exposure to so many of the horrors that are happening around the world. We feel overwhelmed and then hopeless. It is important to remember that a proportion of our numbness is convenient. We avoid the harrowing images or allow ourselves to be immediately overwhelmed. Most of us continue our privileged lives within our complacent cocoons. Outside of the normal pain and difficulties of our lives and those of our friends, we rarely come into contact with the hungry, the destitute, and the oppressed. Their convenient absence from our lives means that we can never follow through and make the connection between the way we live and the awful lives to which our more helpless and vulnerable sisters and brothers are condemned. Not far from any of us are the poor, the homeless, the prisoners, the old people’s homes, and the addicts. Because we are privileged, we have great power. We have a duty to speak out for those who have no voice or are not being listened to. The practice of compassion would show us that no sister or brother deserves to be excluded and pushed onto the bleak margins where life is sheer pain and endurance. We should at least begin to have some conversations with these members of our human family. It would open our eyes. When our compassion awakens, our responsibility becomes active and creative. When we succumb to indifference, we blaspheme against the gifts that we could never earn, that have been so generously given to us. The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
Hope is another quiet virtue. We live in a culture where information is relentlessly meted out to us in abstract particles. So much of our information is a series of facts about how disastrous everything is. When we listen to the voices of doom, we become helpless and complicit in bringing the doom nearer. It is always astounding to see how willing humans are to give away their power and become disciples of helplessness. This accounts for the chromatic cynicism which reigns in our times. Cynicism is very interesting. Behind the searing certainty of the cynic, there is always, hidden somewhere, disappointed longing. It takes quite a good deal of energy to be a committed cynic. Time and again, life offers opportunities and possibilities. Time cannot help being a door into eternity. Within even the most cynical heart, eternity is a light sleeper. It takes considerable energy continually to quell the awakening invitation. Argument with a cynic merely serves this sliced certainty. A more subtle approach that addresses, not the argument, but the residue of disappointed longing can bring change. Our world is too beautiful and our human eternity too magnificent that we should succumb to hopelessness and cynicism. The human heart is a theatre of longings. Under every hardened and chromatic surface, be it system, syndrome, or corporation, there is a region of longing that dreams as surely of awakening to a new life of freedom and love as winter does of the springtime.
There are many other quiet virtues like care, sympathy, patience, confidence, loyalty. A new sense of community could gradually surface if we called upon some of these virtues to awaken. The great religious traditions advocate these as ideals. Increasingly, the custodianship and representation of these traditions have fallen into the hands of frightened functionaries who can only operate through edict and prescription. Few of them have the sensibility and imagination to address our longings in a way that respects our complexity and wildness of soul. They are unable to invite our sense of freedom and creativity to awaken and begin the new journey towards belonging. We need to take back our own power and exercise our right to inhabit in a creative and critical way the traditions to which we belong. We have allowed the functionaries to persuade us that they have the truth and that they own our traditions. A great tradition is a spacious and wonderful home for our nobility of soul and desperation of longing. We need to exercise our belonging in a new and critical way.
Divine Longing Transfigures Absence
One of the lovely things about longing is that it is not merely an abstract concept. Every heart has longing. This means that longing is always full of feeling. There is great concentration now on “getting in touch with your feelings” and “expressing your feelings.” There is often more than a whiff of narcissism about these projects. In this practice we have increasingly lost sight of the beauty and wholesomeness of feeling itself. Feeling is a powerful disclosure of our humanity. A person who can really feel things is fully in touch with his or her own nature. Such nature is difficult to grasp and define, but we do know that we can trust someone who has nature. When we say “There is great nature” in a person, we mean that there is a presence of feeling in them that is passionate, deep, and caring. We can trust that even in awkward times of confusion and conflict the pendulum of nature will eventually come to rest in truth and compassion. It also suggests a deeper substrate of presence than personality, role, or image. When we lose touch with our Nature, we become less human. When we discover our own nature, we find new belonging.
The feeling of longing in your heart was not put there by yourself. We have seen how each of us was conceived in longing, and every moment here has been a pilgrimage of longing. Your life is a path of longing through ever-changing circles of belonging. Your longing echoes the Divine Longing. The heart of transcendence is longing. God is not abstract or aloof. We have done terrible damage to the image of God. We have caricatured God as an ungracious moral accountant and done what we should never have done: We have frozen the feeling of God and drawn the separated mind of God into war with our own nature. God has not done that; our thinking has. The results have been terrible. We have been abandoned in an empty universe with our poor hearts restless in a haunted longing; furthermore, this has closed the door on any possibility of entering into our true belonging. We are victims of longing, and we cannot come home. The thinking that has invented and institutionalized this way of life has damaged us; we are at once guilty and afraid. Of such a God E. M. Cioran writes: “All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.” Our vision is our home. We need to think God anew as the most passionate presence in the universe—the primal well of presence from which all longing flows, and the home where we all belong and to which all belonging returns. God is present to us in a form that endlessly invites our longing, namely, in the form of absence. Simone Weil said, “The apparent absence of God in this world is the actual reality of God.”
God has a great heart. Only a divine artist with such huge longing would have the beauty and tenderness of imagination to dream and create such a wonderful universe. God is full of longing: every stone, tree, wave, and human countenance testifies to the eternal and creative ripple of Divine Longing. This is the tender immensity of Jesus. He is the intimate linkage of everything. William Blake used the phrase “Christ the Imagination.” The deepest nature of everything is longing. This is why there is always such hope of change and transfiguration. Beneath even the most hardened surfaces longing waits. Great music or poetry will always reach us because our longing loves to be echoed. Neither can we ever immunize ourselves against love; it knows in spite of us exactly how to whisper our longing awake. It is as if, under the clay of your presence, streams of living water flow. Great moments always surprise you. The routine is broken, and unexpected crevices appear on the safe surface of your life. Such moments dowse you—they make you recognize that within you there is eternity.