Things Unseen - groaning

Excerpts from the book by Mark Buckanan

"I have a beautiful family: a wife who is healthy, funny, pretty - and a good cook - a three children who are strong, smart, and growing like they ought to. I have fine neighbours, who swap eggs or sugar or video head cleaners with us as needed, who take in our mail when we're away....I have good friends and spend time with them just enjoying companionship, laughter, food.

My life is good - as good as it gets.

Yet I spend a lot of time groaning, and not just in the morning.

Is this just another pathetic story of selfishness, of a shallow but ever-empty man who takes and takes and yet never truly receives? Who is bloated but never full? Who devours but doesn't savor, horads but never treasures, for whom all the riches and pleasures of earth would not suffice?

Maybe.

Or maybe it's this: Some groaning is holy speech, another kind of speaking in tongues.....

This is how: You want to go home. The instinct for heave is just that: homesicknes, ancient as night, urgent as daybreak....Groaning is the lexicon and grammar of our dis-location, our sense of being in the wrong place."

So much wanting. So much longing. And so much pain. Destiny pain.

What if the "so much wanting" is for something earth doesn't have? What if the world that is, even if you gain it all, is not enough, and will never be, and was never meant to be?

Then what?...

In response, we can become so cynical that we poison oursselves, so self-indulgent that we devour ourselves, so despairing that we collapse into ourselves. In fact, self-pity and self-indulgence, boredom and despair, envy and greed - such are only yearnings gone sour...trivia to distract us.

We continually live for the Next Thing - the next purchase, the next weekend, the next job, the next adventure. This becomes so obsessive that we lose the capacity to enjoy and to be thankful for thisthing we have right now or that thing we got yesterday.