Enough will never be enough
We thirst for something far greater than this world can satisfy. So we are always disappointed. Always. But disappointment is itself a gift. Disappointment drives our search for life. We go from one false promise to another, gobbling up things and people in great gulps only to find them go tasteless too soon. And that is the secret of contentment.
It’s when we discover that enough will never be enough that we can finally stop kicking and scratching our way through life, put it all down, and let God be the point of the compass for us. Then we are ready to link arms with the rest of the human race as partners in the great enterprise of life. Then we realize not only the insufficiency of the other on whom we have put the burden of our emotional satisfaction, but of ourselves as well. Because neither we nor they are God, we can finally be gentle with one another.
From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward, 2004).
My adventure into fullness of life (which I take to be the kingdom of heaven) involves reading, writing, and great conversation—preferably over a good meal. It is nourished by the arts, especially music. But there is a paradox here, one that the mystics might understand. What are virtues for the mystics are torments for many of us: alienation, loneliness, silence, solitude, interior emptiness, stripping bare, poverty, not-knowing, emptiness. The arts have, more often than not, given me an experience of being emptied. What we really need is often to be found in what we dread most—risk, not being in control, in the emptiness of the self. This doesn’t sound much like “heaven,” but how else can we make an inner space for living with ourselves and with each other? Cultivating gratitude helps us draw out the gold that is often hidden in the loneliness, the silence, the interior emptiness, the suffering, the poverty, and “the knowledge-that-knows-nothing.”
