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Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears: Learning to Live Beyond Our Fears - Softcover

Rolheiser, Ronald

 
9780385512329: Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears: Learning to Live Beyond Our Fears
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385512325 ISBN 13: 9780385512329
Verlag: IMAGE BOOKS, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The author of The Holy Longing explores the debilitating obsessions that often dominate our lives and offers down-to-earth guidance for learning to leave our fears, anxieties, and guilt “forgotten among the lilies.”“Rarely do we taste the food we eat or the coffee we drink. Instead we go through our days too preoccupied, too compulsive, and too dissatisfied to really be able to be present for and celebrate our own lives,” Ronald Rolheiser writes in the introduction to this powerful collection of essays.Forgotten Among the Lilies shows that there is a better way to find contentment and joy. Only by trusting in God’s grace and providence, Rolheiser argues, can we move beyond our obsessions and rejoice in what we have and who we are.With his trademark blend of insight, compassion, and honesty laced with humor, the author teaches that it is possible to experience freedom instead of anxiety, solitude instead of loneliness, and a generosity of spirit that returns to the giver far more than it costs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RONALD ROLHEISER, O.M.I., is the author of The Holy Longing, which has sold more than 150,000 copies, The Restless Heart, and The Shattered Lantern. He is a specialist in spirituality and systematic theology and writes a regular column in the Catholic Herald. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

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The author of "The Holy Longing explores the debilitating obsessions that often dominate our lives and offers down-to-earth guidance for learning to leave our fears, anxieties, and guilt "forgotten among the lilies."
"Rarely do we taste the food we eat or the coffee we drink. Instead we go through our days too preoccupied, too compulsive, and too dissatisfied to really be able to be present for and celebrate our own lives," Ronald Rolheiser writes in the introduction to this powerful collection of essays.
"Forgotten Among the Lilies shows that there is a better way to find contentment and joy. Only by trusting in God's grace and providence, Rolheiser argues, can we move beyond our obsessions and rejoice in what we have and who we are.
With his trademark blend of insight, compassion, and honesty laced with humor, the author teaches that it is possible to experience freedom instead of anxiety, solitude instead of loneliness, and a generosity of spirit that returns to the giver far more than it costs.

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RESTLESSNESS, SPIRIT and the MARTYRDOM of OBSCURITY

The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame,
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)


Restless Hearts Yearn for God


WE ARE FIRED into life by a madness that comes from our incompleteness. We awake to life tense, aching, erotic, full of sex and restlessness.

This dis–ease is, singularly, the most important force within existence. It is the force for love and we are fundamentally shaped by our loves and deformed by their distortions.

Shakespeare called this our “immortal longings” and poets, philosophers, and mystics have always recognized that, within it, there is precisely something of immortality.

Religiously, we have surrounded this longing with chastity and mystique.

Ultimately our restless aching was seen as nothing less than the yearning within us for God. Augustine’s interpretation of this eros was seen as the proper one: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

The longing was understood religiously: Adam, missing his rib, longing for Eve, man and woman, woman and man, longing for a primal wholeness in God and each other. This was high longing, eros as the spark of the divine in us, the fire from the anvil of God imprisoned inside us like a skylark, causing hopeless disquiet!

In the light of such divine restlessness we lived as pilgrims in time, longing for a consummation in a kingdom not fully of this world, caught, in Karl Rahner’s words, “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, inconsummate, but knowing that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.”

In such a view, we pursued each other, embraced each other, and loved and made love to each other against the horizon of the infinite, under a high symbolic hedge. Love, romance, sex, and passion were sacred things, surrounded by much chastity and mystique.

Today that hedge is lower, the mystique and the chastity are less. We no longer embrace against the horizon of the infinite and our aches are no longer seen as longing for the transcendent.
Instead, for the most part, we have trivialized this longing, making it mean something much more concrete. The longing is for the good life, for good sex, for good successes, for what everybody else has, for the sweetening of life.

There is little mystique in this. Plato, in his Symposium, tells of his students sitting around "telling wonderful stories of the meaning of their longing.” Mystics, in their writings, tell of their deep longing for consummation within the body of Christ.

Today we rarely sit around and tell wonderful stories of the meaning of our longing, and, ordinarily, there is little talk of aching for consummation within the body of Christ.

Our stories are, for the most part, of yearnings more concretely channeled. It is a rare self–understanding today which lets one believe that his or her aches and yearnings are mystical. We are not accustomed to think in such high terms, our symbols are more humble.

Our aches and longings are seen as directed toward what we can attain, practically, in the here and now, achievement, success, sex, limited love and enjoyment.

There is nothing bad about these things, but, in the end, if we define our deepest longings as directed toward them in themselves, we end up in despair. Eventually, we no longer believe that we can recover a primal wholeness through the embrace of another, the perpetuity of our seed, and the contemplation of God. We lower our sights. We trivialize our longing.

We no longer see our longing as a congenital and holy restlessness put in us by God to push us toward the infinite. Instead it becomes a tamed and tame thing, domesticated, anesthetized and distracted. We are restless only in a tired way (which drains us of energy) and not in a divine way (which gives us energy).

And so we should ask ourselves the question: What kind of lovers are we?

Are we still fired into life by a madness which lets us understand the insatiability of our hearts as a call to infinite love? Do we still see ourselves as pursuing each other, embracing each other, and loving each other against the horizon of the infinite? Do we still understand ourselves as meeting on holy ground with all the mystique and chastity that this implies?

Or, do we believe that life is best lived without such mysticism, high romance, high eros, and high chastity? Do we still tell each other wonderful stories of the meaning of our longings or do we discourage each other from raising our eyes above the immediate?

Do we cry with each other and support each other in the frustration of our incompleteness or do we give each other the impression that there is something wrong with us because our lives are inconsummate and our symphonies are incomplete?

Do we still take our longings and emptiness to God in prayer or do we demand that life gives us, here and now, the full symphony?

Do we lovingly and gratefully receive the spirit of our own lives, despite the tensions, or do we live in angry jealousy?

Are we loving against an infinite horizon or is our eros directed only towards the concrete sweetening of life?

What kind of lovers are we?


Longing Is Our Spiritual Lot


ON FEBRUARY 12th, 1944, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank wrote the following words in her now famous Diary (Pan, 1968):

Today the sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I am longing—so longing—for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone.

And I do so long…to cry! I feel as if I am going to burst, and I know that it would get better with crying; but I can’t, I’m restless, I go from room to room, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, “can’t you satisfy my longing at last?”

I believe that it is spring within me, I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally, I feel utterly confused. I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing.


There is in all of us, at the very center of our lives, a tension, an aching, a burning in the heart that is insatiable, non–quietable and very deep. Sometimes we experience this longing as focused on a person, particularly if we are in a love that is not consummated. Other times we experience this yearning as a longing to attain something.

Most often, though, it is a longing without a clear name or focus, an aching that cannot be clearly pinpointed or described. Like Anne Frank, we only know that we are restless, full of disquiet, aching at a level that we cannot seem to get at.

When we look into history, philosophy, poetry, mysticism and literature we see an astonishing variety of ways in which this aching is expressed.

For instance, many of us have read Richard Bach's little parable, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This book spoke deeply to millions of people. It is a very simple story: Jonathan is a seagull who, when he comes to consciousness, is not satisfied with being a seagull. He looks at his life, and the lives of other seagulls, and he finds it too small: “All a seagull ever does is eat and fight!” So Jonathan tries to burst out. He tries to fly higher, to fly faster, to do anything that might...

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Verlag
IMAGE BOOKS
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385512325
ISBN 13 
9780385512329
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
315
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
CMN Printpool Inh. Mathis Neumann
https://www.also.com/ec/cms5/en_6000/6000

Friedrich-Karl-Str. 9
Hamburg
22391
Deutschland

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