The Holy Quality of Restlessness
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by Brian Beckett
"Does the restlessness ever go away? I mean, does it ever, does anyone get to the point where the desire is fully satisfied? Does anyone?"These are the words of a woman in her mid-30's, married with two active teens, who works full-time as a receptionist at a group medical practice and is active in church affairs. Our get-togethers every four weeks are for her "an oasis...the one safe place in which I can rest." In my opinion, this restlessness with restlessness is one of the primary characteristics of spiritual growth.
I think we all are created with this desire for love, belonging, and acceptance. This desired-for love can only be received as gift; yet much of our life-energy is spent trying to secure this unsecureable love, to nail it down. Much of our personality development can be seen as rising from this desire for unconditional love and especially our response when this desire is left unfilled.
We try to secure love by attempting to please others or maybe by demonstrating how efficient we can be. Or maybe we tell the world to go to hell, deciding we can secure the love we need without anyone else. But we know down deep that this love we are earning, while certainly better than nothing and at times rather sweet and tasty, is--in the final analysis--conditional. This earned-love does not respond to our deepest longing.
To me, the spiritual life is a restless life; a living between the desire to trust and the desire to make love happen. Months ago I thought we were supposed to live as completely as possible in this desire to trust. But now I'm not too sure. Maybe to listen only to the desire to trust voice to the willful exclusion of the desire to make this happen voice is to accept the tempter's challenge to be our own master; an unwillingness to hear the whole story. The voice of loving acceptance loses its saving power if we do not come to an awareness of our striving to put conditions on that which is unconditional. In other words, to receive the unconditional love of God we need to claim our own strivings toward manufacturing this love.
All of our attempts to earn rather than receive love are precious. They will, one day, fail. They can not respond fully to our deepest love-desire. But when they do fail, we are blessed with a listening ear that hears clearly the voice of one crying from the wilderness, calling out attention inwardly to the source of love. Our efforts to grasp love become the springboard upon which we can awaken to the true giftedness of God's love. As Jerry May writes in Simply Sane, "Trying is not such a bad thing. It will not achieve what we most desire, but it does express our desire--and that alone is an act of human beauty."
Spiritual development is concerned with entering into the restlessness of unfulfilled desire. It attends to the listening, nurturing and respecting holy quality of restlessness. And somehow, amazingly so, here is rest. Yet the sense of incompleteness, the yearning and desire, are ever present.
Brian, a United Methodist pastor, is an Associate in the Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of Summer l994. This article is taken from one of his program papers.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.