Yearning as a Way of Connecting
There's a Sufi story that speaks to me about the value of yearning. An old peasant is sitting by the side of the road calling out to God. A cynic walks by and says to him, "I hear you day after day calling 'Allah, Allah, Allah,' and from the looks of you, Allah never replies." Hearing this, the old man becomes so disheartened that he quits praying. A while later, an angel comes to him and says, "Why did you stop calling out to Allah?" The old man explains that God had never answered him. "But you should know," said the angel, "your call to God is the answer."
Longing, desiring, yearning, dreaming—all are ways that we call to God, and just that act alone makes a two-way connection with the Divine. Mystics, like the Sufi in the story, know this. Mystical poetry and stories often reflect an intense desire for this kind of connection. I thought of this listening to studio guests Rabbi Irwin Kula and the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas on the New Morning show about Longing.
How I relate to this theme and can take it into my day came to me rather obliquely. Joan Borysenko used the phrase "When I was a little girl" as she told a story about a young man who followed his bliss. My mind went right to the little girl part, and I remembered that as a little girl, I just loved wishing rituals. I loved to blow out the candles on my birthday cake. I tossed coins into fountains. I wished on stars. I wished on the tip of a piece of pie. (An explanation of that practice is in order. My mother, a wise strategist, told her four children that if we cut the tip off our pie, set it aside, ate the rest of the pie without talking, and then ate the tip, we could make a wish on the tip. Years later, I discovered other families didn't do this; it was just Mother's way of getting a chance to talk to my father without children interrupting them at the end of dinner!)
Should we encourage such wishing? I think so. It's a good spiritual exercise to concretize our desires, to put names on them and places and times. I try to be very specific in my wishing—not just for happiness but to be grateful and content in a particular situation, for example. And I also try to make sure that my wishing is not just for myself.
This reminds me of another of my family's rituals. On Christmas Eve, we put an apple with a candle at each place setting at dinner. After grace is said, we each make a wish and blow out the candle; we then have to eat the apple before bedtime for the wish to have a chance of coming true. (That stipulation comes from my mother not wanting to waste food, no doubt.) And there's one more condition: our desires need to be for someone else and not directly affect us. That's another way that yearning can become a way of connecting.