There is an ache at the heart of us, an ache we strain to satisfy and bring to an end. Everything we do can be traced back, however tortuous the trail of string, to this fundamental ache. It is with us always, but I think the holiday season especially brings it to the fore.
This ache emerges with our birth because we enter this world already bereft. But bereft of what? All of us without exception sense a loss, an estrangement from something that once found should still make us whole. This is the core of all our desires, the hidden goal of all our seeking.
We hurt for the home we never had. The ancestral memory woven into our flesh remembers painfully what we had and lost. Our first parents’ forfeiture of paradise and communion with God shapes us in ways we try to hide from even ourselves.
The world, in its prelinguistic otherness, woos each of us in the same moment that it evades us. The things we see and touch and hear are things we name so as to make them more approachable. And yet we find that their value as symbols slips through the net of names we spread open to capture them.
Our world is simultaneously alien and home, intimately exterior to us. It is, as psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan said, “something strange to [us], although it is at the heart of [us].” Lacan studied the human tendency to be both dissatisfied with the supposed objects of our desire and to persistently pursue these things all the same: things that not only do not satisfy us but even hurt us.
He rejected, therefore, the positive psychology popular in his day (as we should in ours). Lacan did not reason from a theological standpoint, but he inevitably came within religion’s orbit in examining this tendency. One cannot affirm Freud’s death drive, after all, without coming into the vicinity of the Apostle Paul’s diagnostic in Romans 7.
Language is our port of entry into apprehending and enjoying our world. And yet it is also the mark of our estrangement from it, for there is always a gap between the significance and meaning of a thing and our experience of it. Every signifier promises arrival at something our symbolic world promises will bring us to completion, will usher us into the love we desperately need: the home we seek to return to.
We distort the metaphorical assonance between signifier and signified and imagine instead there is a perfect match between the two. But the thing signified does not coincide with its signification. We never take hold of that which we truly desire: the status, dignity, love, and all else we take these things to encapsulate.
The symbolic excess every concept carries is not within each instance of the thing that is named. As mewithoutYou sings in “My Exit, Unfair”: “I said ‘water’/ Expecting the word / Would satisfy my thirst.” This means that signification brings about interminable detours from what we, in our least understood but deepest parts of ourselves, want most. We pursue signifiers yearning for the signified, and chasing after symbols and concepts are left to settle with things.
If we are honest with ourselves, we find that whatever we acquire is laughably far removed from what we imagined we had obtained. However good it is — the job, the spouse, the car, the straight A’s, the rare vinyl record, the high score — it is not enough for us to be fulfilled. The object of our seeking and working is not the object of our desire.
The promotion makes you a supervisor and brings with it a better salary but does not make you a good husband or a good father as you know you should be and wish you were. I can fill my shelves with books, but it will not make academic elites recognize me as a scholar. And even if they did, the luster of that achievement would quickly fade, as that recognition isn’t the recognition I most deeply crave. I can go back to that house on Mole Avenue, but it’s no longer the home I remember spending past Christmases in.
And so, time after time, in the moment of acquisition we are brought up short. We want once again, in the word’s proper sense, as our lack reveals itself once more to our consciousness. Our hand is filled, but our soul resounds with the cavernous frequency of emptiness.
Most of the time we ignore this gap and these detours. We assure ourselves, “This time will be different!” and lock in to this pattern of self-obfuscation, toiling after the deferrals of our desire.
And yet there are moments of metaphor that spark into our lives. They provide a glimpse of our deepest desire: that which shapes us as the persons we are as well as the ones we fail to be. It shows itself in serendipitous instances that place a sample of the thing itself into our hands. You get the 100% on the exam and see that your being a failure was only inevitable so long as you believed that lie. I read of Boromir’s last stand and repentance and see that I — even I — can still accomplish something worthwhile in spite of my egregious faults.
Under normal circumstances, the elusiveness of our true desire provokes despair, but these moments of metaphor bridge part of the gap and supply a foretaste of that desire. These moments occur when the Spirit breathes life within the hollow spaces of these objects, places, and memories. The gap that metaphor spans does not disappoint in these moments but awakens hope in us. Because in the Spirit’s movement we recognize a call, one that moves beyond the object we can see and touch to the God who made both it and us. And in moments such as these, our hearts tremble with a delight that is more than the pleasure of obtaining something we wanted. It is anticipation of that from which we are separated, and that longing gives us life.
Who in our time has better recognized this than C. S. Lewis? Probably his greatest value as an apologist is how he intimately knows our lack and the superabundance of our desire. He says in “The Weight of Glory” that his aim is to “rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of [us],” a desire for a far-off country which it pains us to admit animates our lives. It is a secret that hurts to openly name because it lies at the very heart of our being. The most vulnerable aspect of our selves is openly displayed in this yearning.
Lewis understood that lack constitutes us. We were made to desire and be satisfied with God, and that urge persists in our divided, fallen state. “Our whole being by its very nature is one vast need,” he observes in The Four Loves; “incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.” Lacan’s great contribution to critical theory was his insistence on the first part of this statement. Lewis, however, does something greater by testifying that this need is answered by Jesus Christ.
I think some of us are embarrassed by the cliché of the God-shaped hole in our hearts precisely because we know it is true, and admitting it risks exposing not only how incomplete and how immature we are, but also how sharply we hurt for communion with God. But we must overcome our embarrassment and push the insights of psychoanalysis to their proper conclusion in the gospel.
If we flatten this colossal, animating desire by calling it nostalgia, we lie, for if we ever could return to “those moments in the past, [we] would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it,” Lewis writes. “What [we] remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.” Whatever moment of our past that we imagine contains the whole we seek never actually had it, only an outcropping of that which we truly desire.
Lacan must attribute this feeling of loss to the split in our subjectivity and the split between signifier and signified. While this is true, it isn’t the ultimate answer. Lacan believes we imagine origin stories of breaking and losing to explain this intuition, but Lewis sees through this. “Our lifelong nostalgia,” he writes, “our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”
We are right to praise God for these moments of vision and foretaste. But we must not permit ourselves the deceitful gratification that pretends the gap is now overcome. The eschatological future still awaits. The fullest, most substantial consummation of our desire is not yet here. “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status,” he wrote in a 1959 letter. Joy “always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”
We must remember this as we cherish the gifts of God now. Their imperfect mediation of the embarrassing riches of God’s marvelousness point beyond themselves. Lewis warns that
these things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.
We search in vain for the satisfaction that will match and put an end to our desire. There is no such thing. Lewis confirms an intuition we regularly hide from ourselves. The gospel authorizes us to admit the truth: The home we long for is not here. Not yet. The surplus of our desire is unfulfillable in our world. But consolation comes in this admission, as we are freed to receive scintillating portions of fulfillment.
We therefore do not pursue the extinction of desire. Rather, we see that faith involves holding out our desire to the God who promises to fulfill it. It means holding out our disappointments to the God who records our tears (Psalm 56:8). It means recognizing that what we settle for in this world very often holds little real value. But it also means treasuring those moments in which the world momentarily acts as a window, revealing the God that we ache above all to be reunited with.
