That Past Voice of God

Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash

Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and find myself stricken by nostalgia, longing for the times when I was studying or working overseas. This usually resulted in me getting up in the mornings not only-sleep deprived, but having my half-waking haze peppered by feelings of angst at my present circumstance.

What I have learned to realise is that a very basic component of the angst was borne out of the physical limitation of being here in Australia. The laws of physics have placed a real limit on my desire to stretch myself beyond Australian shores and be back on European or American soil. Not just for a brief stint, but to be really back there, living in those places, all at once. I wanted to be living in all the countries, and yet through physical, professional and economic limitations, I am confined to just one.

I want to have all the options in life, and for the same reasons, obtaining the ability to get those options has confined me to those afforded by the city I am currently in. Paradoxically, being able to act on my desires puts a brake on my desires.

When my nostalgia and my desire to act on that nostalgia come up against my limits I get tempted to think that, in the face of the frustration of my desires borne by my many limitations, I am meant to be somewhere else.  Moreoever, I cannot shake the feeling that I am being called by God to be somewhere else, to this place that formed a part of my past.

A corrective came when I read My Heart is Glad Because You Live, Oh Christ by Fr Julian Carron, the leader of Communion and Liberation. A segment of those notes spoke to the very issues of nostalgia, of limitations that press against your desires, and of trying to discern the voice of God in the face of these circumstances. For Carron, both of these experiences are subsets of the same sensibility, outworkings of what Luigi Giussani called “the religious sense” – the desire for more than what circumstances are allowing you to do at any given moment.

Carron reminded us that what God calls us to is not in the realm of fantasy, but in light of the real circumstances of your life. Thus nostalgia, being more than a passive memory but a longing for an experience from your past, runs the risk of turning one away from his or her circumstances. What compounds the tragedy, Carron says, is that often nostalgia is a longing for “the place I have never succeeded in reaching. But it is what we would have wanted to be…”. Our nostalgia is more often than not a longing for a non-place, a mirage of our past experience.

What then of the border that lies between our desires and the pushback against them by our circumstances? Carron addresses this at two levels. At one level, Carron cites Giussani in acknowledging the reality that is borne by the limitations to our desires. Giussani states that “you do not belong to the limit…and for this reason you are pushed, driven, drawn to try to grasp more, know more, penetrate more”. At the same time, the inability to break through the limits of our circumstances should be an occasion to our realisation of a fundamental poverty, one that corresponds with a fundamental need for God to purify, direct and yes, realise, your desire.

The limitations that you face, Carron concludes in this section, constitutes an opportunity. In his words, our constant experience of limit is what “enables us to recognise the accent of [God’s] voice when it echoes in our life”. It is not our turn to the fantasy of nostalgia in which the voice of God can be discerned, but in the reality of our circumstances, and the limitations that come with them. It is not an abstract voice, but a voice that acquires an accent, complete with stops, emphases and intonations, when it touches the very real cleavages between our desires and our circumstances.

In the Christian tradition conversion, referred to in greek as metanoia or “turning towards”, is never simply a once off, but a constant process. We are always called to turn away from things and turn back towards the face and voice of God. It might very well be that part of our metanoia will involve a turning away from the fantasies we conjure back to the real textures of our own lives, since it is in the structure of those circumstances that the glimmers and echoes of the Word that informs those structures can be found.

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