I believe that for those of us on the spiritual path, there is a deep longing to merge with the Divine, whom I name as God/dess (feel free to substitute your own name for the Divine as you read this essay).  But it seems that, no matter how deeply I go, there is a gap, even a chasm that I cannot cross. There is always a distance between me and the Holy, and I am left longing for more.

I just read a biography of Julian of Norwich. She had ecstatic visions of Jesus and was in an intimate relationship with him, but always was left feeling the distance between herself and Jesus. She said in her Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 41, “But yet oftentimes our trust is not full: for we are not sure that God heareth us, as we think because of our unworthiness, and because we feel right nought, (for we are as barren and dry oftentimes after our prayers as we were afore); and this, in our feeling our folly, is cause of our weakness. For thus have I felt in myself.” She had a longing that was never completely filled, and eventually she reconciled herself to the notion that she could never completely merge with Christ.

Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to the sick and the poor in India, was consumed with doubt. In one of her letters, she wrote, “I utter words of community prayers — and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give — but my prayer of union is not there any longer — I no longer pray.”

Last week, I wrote about merging my ego self with my deep self, my Soul. Even though I work hard to let go and merge into that deep spiritual connection, I am only partially successful. There is a longing in my soul that is never completely filled.

No matter how close I am to the Divine, I can never truly know the mind of God/dess. Even though God/dess dwells within me, the mind of the Divine is far too vast for me to know. Think of a drop of water in the ocean. It is a part of the ocean. You could even say that it is ocean, but it can never know the vastness of the ocean itself. It is similar to a cell of the body. The cell carries out its functions, its reasons for being, yet it can only know its small function within the whole. It can never know the entire body. The cell can never know the body in the way the body knows the cell. I can never know God/dess, then, in the way she knows me. No matter how closely we merge, I am but a small part of her vastness, only a small cell of her body.

Human beings are hard-wired to search for something greater than themselves. There is a deep longing to fill the empty places inside of us. Some fill it with things of the world – money, work, drugs, sex, family, fame. Some seek to fill it with a greater purpose, a relationship with the Divine.

I believe that the longing inside me is the mechanism by which I am called into the Divine. Without the longing, it would be easy to ignore the spiritual side of myself. Continuing to feel that deep pull, that longing for the Divine, is not a spiritual failure on my part, but it is how God/dess calls me to a deeper relationship with Herself. The longing calls me ever more deeply into the Divine Mystery.  Even though I am but a tiny piece of that vastness that is the Holy mystery, I am pulled by that deep unfulfilled longing toward the Mystery, the Divine God/dess herself.

Barbara Garland
September, 2022