When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere; just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there–how he forgot where he was going and then he woke up. If you listen, he’ll tell you about the time, he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. And Then he’ll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn’t perfect. We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had. –Donald Draper, Madmen
If you asked me to sum up the human experience, I don’t think I could say more with many words than I will say with just one: Longing. There’s a certain shiftiness those things for which we hope and desire–they either evade us or aren’t quite what we thought they would be when we get them. In the end, they aren’t enough. We previously discussed the idea of Longing in terms of a desire to go Home. I’d like to pick the topic back up today using the idea of Shalom.
Shalom is a Hebrew word meaning: a state of peace, completeness and welfare–fully restored and whole. It’s a state of being, not a place. In many ways, it’s the opposite of Longing. A man cannot be at peace and still ache–cannot be whole and still empty. I think Shalom may be the thing for which we seek–it’s the Home we have never known, and yet we somehow know of it. Our longings point us there: both the incompleteness of our joy and the pain of our sorrow.
Ever notice how even the very best things in this world somehow fail to keep their promises? C.S. Lewis put it this way:
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
We are left wanting more or other, but left still wanting–still longing…
