These last few months I have come to see more and more how some sense of longing seems to be a part and parcel of human nature, and will never go away. It comes from the fact, as John O’Donohue wrote in Anam Chara, that the human person is a “threshold where many infinities meet”. This can explain why, for many of us, a sense of wonder can exist in a world which is finite:

The human being is an in-between presence, belonging neither fully to the earth from which she has come, nor to the heavens toward which her mind and spirit aim….The creator of the universe loves circles: time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle. But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature. That is why you can’t enter your own life or inhabit your full presence without a vital and real relationship with some other person.

John O Donohue, The Presence of Compassion

photo hedera baltica