God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best regarding how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present that is colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches, and anxieties that have little to do with the people we are sitting with at table. Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings,” and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the happiest moments of our existence, we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness and, In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.” Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.[1]
[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Our Restless Selves,” February 2025.