The Holy Longing: Guidelines for a Christian Spirituality
By Ronald Rolheiser
Rating: 8
July 13, 2009
I was introduced to Rolheiser through quotes and excerpts from this book at a spiritual formation retreat. And now that I’ve read it, it’s deep. Though I may disagree with many of his exegetical insights and theology, the insights about spirituality are ultimately spot-on.
He starts with an interesting take on spirituality: “Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing — an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else … Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire” (4-5).
And throughout the book, he’s constantly redefining terms, so that words like spirituality and sexuality take on far larger, and more signficant, meaning that can be inspirational to the soul. But his poetic style and his constant defining can sometimes make it difficult to really know — exactly — what he’s trying to say. Then again, it is a spiritual book, so the writing will naturally lean toward connections rather than detailed explanations.
That being said, it’s a wonderful glimpse of how Christian spirituality can be so much more encompassing of the real life we live by being realistic about the desires that burn within us. Given our society’s constant egging on of our desires — tryign to make us addicts so as to profit from us — Rolheiser describes a spirituality that gives our faith a fighting chance in today’s world.
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