More about longing

I don't normally want to copy stuff from a book here but I was reading something this morning that spoke about longing and being in a way that made me want to share it here. The long quote that will follow comes from a book called The Quest for the Living God by Elizabeth Johnson. In it she is discussing the work of a wonderful German theologian of the 20th century called Karl Rahner. I hope it won't be too 'dense' to follow. It really is, or so it seems to me, worth pondering. It is about our quest to find meaning, to find answers, never to give up our search for what our life is about, where we are heading and what is driving us. It is at its simplest, it seems to me, about the meaning and power of human curiosity which is part of the very fiber of our human nature.

Here is the excerpt:

Following Rahner's train of thought we started with the [person] who asks a question...In every question we ask, we transcend the immediate point and reach dynamically for something more. Even in the most mundane inquiry we go beyond the matter at hand toward the next thing and the next and ultimately toward...what is infinite...This same pattern can be traced again if we start not with the human mind and its desire to know but with the human will and its experience of freedom. Freedom is not something one has, like a motor in a car. Rather it is being persons present to ourselves ...able to some degree to transcend forces and objects that might predetermine who we are. Freedom [includes] what one is in the worlds of family, community, business, politics, work of all kinds and who one ultimately is in acceptance or refusal of the infinite and mysterious horizon of one's very existence. Here too we experience a never-ending dynamism of desire to seek and receive that propels the spirit forward. Every act by which a person loves another , for example, deepens the ability to give and receive yet more love in a widening circle of relationship which defines who we are. In every aspect, human freedom, like reason ...keeps on transcending beyond everything it grasps.

Once one grasps this pattern of human self-transcendence one sees that this single basic experience is present in a thousand forms. Not only do we curiously question and freely love, but we desire happiness, we know loneliness, we doubt, resist injustice, we plan projects to benefit others, we act responsibly, we remain faithful to conscience under pressure, we are amazed at beauty, we feel guilt, we rejoice, we grieve death, we hope in the future. Undergirding all these personal moments is an immense and driving longing. At root we experience that we are oriented to something more.      Let us not for the moment, say what this 'more' is. It is something like a horizon that opens up the landscape and beckons us onward, encircling our lives though we can never reach it.