Sehnsucht

"The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.'" Mere Christianity

Sehnsucht, desire, longing, romanticism, joy--this is one of the major themes in the writing of C. S. Lewis. Here Lewis calls it the desire for my own true country. This is the echo in Lewis which speaks most profoundly to my own heart.

This longing has been piqued in my own soul by a number of different objects, people, places and occasions--too many to recount here. But just to mention a few . . .

I can still remember the feeling of waking up on the first morning of summer vacation when I was five or six years old, that feeling of--"Wow! I have a whole day, a whole summer in fact, to do whatever I most enjoy doing!"

I remember the look of the first library I ever stepped into--the smell, the feel of old books. Similar to that feeling of waking up on the first morning of summer vacation, I had a sense of endless vistas to explore.

Then there was the wanderlust of autumn--golden, crimson and orange leaves floating down through crisp air on a sparkling, sunlit, Saturday morning. What could be finer?

Somewhere in the first decade or so of life there was the experience of falling in love--not, at first, a sexual experience, but just a delight in a person. Again there was the feeling of endless nooks and crannies to explore.

Perhaps the longest running sehnsucht of my life has been a love of England. It began when looking at slides through a hand slide-viewer from one of my parents' trips to England--the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace--vivid color, pageantry, royalty. Then there was the first visit to England around ten years of age--even exploring London on my own. Peering into one of the seemingly cavernous entrances to the Queen's residence I suddenly knew in my soul that longing for hierarchy which Lewis embedded in Narnia.

Later still, the experience of seeing the dreaming spires of Oxford for the first time filled me with a sense of longing. But longing for what? The Oxford of the past in which C. S. Lewis lived? Or was it a longing for the Oxford of the future--the perfect heavenly city? I suspect it was the latter. For, as Lewis says, there is still that longing of the soul which no summer vacation, no book, no autumn morning, no person and no place can ever satisfy.

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men." Ecclesiastes 3:11

Father, thank you for setting eternity in my heart.

Help me never to forget my true home in you.

Thank you for making a way back home

through the life, death and resurrection of your Son.

Enable me by your Spirit day by day,

to take one step closer to home,

and help others to do the same.

Amen.

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