Can Longing and Hope Coexist?
Seasons of longing come to all of us, and we often feel the lack of what we desire keenly. But in these times, hope is not a denial—it lives in longing.
When James Cameron’s epic Avatar was released (despite the laziness of using the Papyrus font), it was a massive box-office success. People could not get enough of the fictional world of Pandora. Quite literally, COULD NOT get enough. Many viewers stated in post-viewing interviews that they were experiencing mental health struggles of depression from returning to their everyday lives. They wanted to live in the idyllic world of Pandora. I haven’t actually seen Avatar, but I remember reading articles in the news about this phenomenon when it came out.
A God-Shaped Hole
Transcendence or the longing for more is a common human condition. If you are as old as I am and grew up in a Christian environment, you may remember the 1999 hit by Plumb entitled “God-Shaped Hole.” The concept was not new to Tiffany Arbuckle. Often quoted by preachers and based on ancient writers like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Augustine’s famous line in Confessions, the idea captures the sense of longing we experience that is often difficult to put our finger on. Unsurprisingly, C. S. Lewis put it quite succinctly in Till We Have Faces:
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from. My country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing?”
Several years ago, an artist named Heath McNease wrote a concept album called The Weight of Glory: Songs Inspired by the Works of C. S. Lewis. His take on this book in the first verse of the same-titled song is:
It's the longing that brought me here/For a home that I never had/So now when I leave/It's not that I'm gone/It's just that I'm going back.
FOMO and envy are incorrect forms of longing. So how does the Christian idea of longing, written about from Augustine to Lewis, stack up against that? How does the longing we feel differ? In some ways, it doesn’t. The longing comes from the same place, but what is being longed after makes all the difference.
A Longing Rooted In Hope
For the Christian, that longing is rooted in hope and not in lack. It is the realization that our Hope is in our Savior and in His Atonement. It is the hope that one day, we will rest fully in Him, and that rest gives us peace and fulfillment here on earth.
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. — Augustine
Augustine lived centuries ago, and yet his quote could have been written yesterday, although if written yesterday, it might have involved the words “No cap.” We are not made for this world, and the longer we work to satisfy this longing with things that are inherently tied to this earth, the emptier we feel. Longing misplaced is an Avatar-sized problem. It’s a feeling of displacement on an existential level.
As we move into Advent, we enter a season of longing, but one rooted in hope. This Advent season, find the fulfillment of your heart’s longing in the Savior who came to earth to redeem us.
Through the Week:
Many churches and families take this time to read through Luke 2 and other areas in the Gospels that tell the story of God’s fulfillment of this longing. Take a moment as you read through these to identify the ones in these accounts who seemed to experience this emptiness and longing. Not everyone in Israel in those days was eagerly looking for the Messiah. Look at what sets apart the ones who stayed rooted in that hope, and see if you can draw parallels to your own life.
