The Secret – Sunday, February 15, 1981
Mortals share a secret which they hardly ever confess to one another—or if they do it is with some embarrassment, some hesitation, a feeling that no one else could possibly understand their meaning. And if on some long winter night in intense conversation when barriers are down and formalities are set aside for an instant, the topic is approached, it is as if one has let another into his sanctuary, his personal sacred ground where few have ever trod before.
What is this secret that everyone feels is his own, alone—for we so rarely do, but our best approach to it may be to say that we have a yearning for something and we know not what it is. We run through the weeks fulfilling our appetites, having successes, trying frantically to find ways to entertain or recreate ourselves, and always if we will admit it we are haunted by the question, “Is this all?” It isn’t that we are not grateful for the good things that happen to us, nor that we don’t have moments of hearty laughter and sweet accomplishment. It is, that we are haunted by a kind of life-long nostalgia for something from which we now feel cut off, “to be,” as C. S. Lewis said, “on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside.”1
Now there are moments when this private hungering seems about to be satisfied. A fine piece of music may give us that sudden sensation that we are about to burst our chains and grasp that something more for which we long. A certain glimpse of nature on a certain morning may give us that momentarily wholeness which seems to stop the yearning. But always the expanded feeling evaporates, and leaves us feeling that we are incomplete, wanting something permanently that the earth has not to offer.
What are we to do about our unsatisfied yearnings? Many among us think their longing for something more can be satiated in another love, another vacation, another luxury. “When I have this,” or “When I have that,” they believe, these yearnings will go away. But the yearnings persist and they always will for the desire we have which no natural happiness seems to satisfy is a longing for our true home with the Lord. It is a something more which the earth, in fact, cannot offer. It can only occasionally stir our memory.
The unsatisfied yearnings of our soul merely remind us then, that we are strangers here. They are our divine link with a world for which we are for now just being schooled.
1 Lewis, C. S., The Weight of Glory, pg. 12, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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February 15, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,687