Learning from yearning

Back in January 2014, I wrote a post about how frequently I ran into the same person when I was in a bookstore. It wasn’t every time, but it was often enough to not surprise me when I saw him again.

The person I used to run into was Melancholy.

I said in that post that I think it was because “I am running face to face into my finiteness.” So many books to read. So little time.

I’m using some of that time these days to read Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark. It’s rare to read someone who reflects your own un-articulated thoughts back to you… articulated. “That’s exactly how I think!” I find myself regularly dumbfounded as he playfully picks the words to describe some of my own unspoken musings. Do you ever feel like you know someone (or that they know you) when you read something they’ve written?

Andrew is that person. I feel like we would be friends if proximity and livelihoods had arranged for the frequency that forming a friendship requires. In my mind, we are on a first-name basis since he seems to be have walked in my soul and been able to write about what he’s seen.

In a footnote in one chapter, I discovered why I run into Melancholy in bookstores. Peterson identifies that ethereal, untangible feeling as “sehnsucht.”

“It is an untranslatable compound German word… and it roughly means an inconsolable yearning or wistful longing for something one cannot explain or does not know. When I came upon this word, I was relieved to find such a concise way of describing this nearly incommunicable feeling.”^[1]Do You Feel a Yearning for Something You Can’t Explain? There’s a Word for Thatby M.C. Scarlett on Introvert, Dear, January 25, 2018

Andrew pointed out in the footnote that not only did C.S. Lewis use the word define an inconsolable longing, but he even “pointed to it as proof for the existence of God.”

“We all feel it. We’re all familiar with it on some level. What’s it there for if we’re just meaningless clusters of cells hurtling through a meaningless universe?”^[2]Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson (B&H Publishing Group, 2019), p7-8.

Prolific author and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner died last month at the age of 96 (the same age that Queen Elizabeth died). More will be written about the queen than Buechner, but he most definitely wrote more than the queen.

Andrew observed that while Buechner (as far as he knew) never used the word sehnsucht in his writings, “his writings describe it (and evoke it) time and again, and he consistently exhorts us to pay attention to it. Pay attention to the moments when we’re crying without knowing why. It could be that the author of the great mystery of creation is whispering to you.”^[3]Ibid.

Looking back on my post from 2014, I realize I misidentified my frequent guest at bookstore as “Melancholy.” It was Sehnsucht. I’m learning about my yearning.

You see, I ran into him again just last week in Barnes & Noble. It’s not always sadness that he provokes. It’s just… longing. Sometimes it’s tinged with joy. Most times, he evokes this desire in me to write, to create, to describe. My thoughts swirl. My imagination soars. And in those brief seconds, it seems as if I’m caught between two worlds. I’m stuck in the transporter beam. I’m still here, and yet I’m there – and there is indescribable.

As the feeling fades (and sometimes it fades so fast that it was almost like walking through someone’s fading perfume mist), I am left without a work of art to show the world.

As quickly as I saw Sehnsucht, he deftly exits the bookstore. I often find myself standing there, in a row of books or looking at my computer screen, aware again of the hum of the lights above or of the clink of the barista behind the counter.

All I know that is my soul brushed up against a moment of glory. It was consequential and unnerving and wonderful all at the same time. And now all is… “normal” again.

I think heaven must be the complete fulfillment of sehnsucht. My mind and capacity for wonder is so finite in my present being that all I can handle is seconds of sehnsucht. In heaven, however, I’l be able – by God’s grace and mercy – to experience fulfillment of all my deepest, unarticulated and unimagined longings.

And I’ll be on a first name basis with God Himself. Because he hasn’t just walked across my soul like Andrew. He made it.

What about you?

I’d love to hear about your own experiences with sehnsucht.