Longing and Hope

In all of our lives we have longings and hopes. The degree of that longing varies from person to person as well as the nature of the desire. But one thing is certain, hope and longing is ingrained in our being. C.S. Lewis describes this experience with the German word, Sehnsucht, the deep seeking and searching of “union with something from which we are separated.” We long for reunion with a past place, person, or experience. “We keep wanting to get back or go to get in.”

I think most important part of this is that these deep longings are unfulfillable.  No matter how much we long for it, we cannot become one with the music we are listening to.  We cannot fully integrate ourselves into nature. We cannot enter perfect solidarity with our loved ones no matter the relationship. This is not to say that these things aren’t great blessings from God. They are magnificent parts of life. But no matter how close to perfect they are, there will always be a longing inside of us because they cannot be fully complete.  As much as we hate to admit it, in our earthly world, time changes all things. People change, places change, and we change. The analogy the Plantinga made of coming home for Christmas break after the first semester of school was incredibly true. I saw myself as a different person when I was home again. Clearly not everything had changed, but my relation to many of my friends was different. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is true that we will never be the same as we once were.

The fact of the matter is that we cannot achieve our longings completely in this world, as Tolkein explains it we long for something that is “beyond the walls of the world.” We all have longings and desires that we cannot fulfill because our true longing is for God. Saint Augustine explains it by saying, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” God has created us to be in unity with him, that is what our heart truly desires. We draw this attention away towards other things. It is important to note that many of these things aren’t wrong, or inherently wrong. The desire of love with others is a beautiful thing, but we also desire what lies behind that love, which is God.

Plantinga then talks about the three ingredients necessary for hope; imagination, faith, and desire. To truly hope for something you must incorporate all three aspects.  As Christians  it is our duty to hope for and search for the righteousness of God.  This is a trickier goal then it sounds. As finite human beings we do not inherently know what is righteous and worth following. It is vital for us to use discernment through the lens of scripture and deep prayer, otherwise we can very easily follow our own personal desires while thinking we are doing God’s work. One point I thought was interesting in all of this was Plantinga’s advice to be careful when trying to have empathy with those you are in contention with. Hope varies for different people and we need to be aware of that. Otherwise we can fall prey to Bulverism.

During his section on Shalom Plantinga says something that I found very profound. “Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and the same goes for hope.” I found this idea incredibly insightful, and it reminded me of another quote from Dr. Cornel West. "Yet hope is no guarantee. Real hope is grounded in a particularly messy struggle and it can be betrayed by naive projections of a better future that ignore the necessity of doing the real work." Too often we hope for renewal in our world but we don't want to act to make our hope a reality. It is true that we cannot reach perfect unity with our Sehnsucht in this world with the majority of our desires. But our longing and search for shalom with God can be answered by God. The example that Plantinga uses is that of Martin Luther King Jr. whose hope and longing of racial equality brought change to all of our lives.
We all have a deep longing for shalom with God, He is waiting for us all we have to do is go to Him. As Saint Augustine said, "late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you... You were with me, and I was not with you."