We need, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, to be given permission to accept as God-given that imperialism inside our soul, that divinely placed fire, even as we need always to be careful never to trivialize its power and meaning. Some comments that cause one to pause and think deeply about our restlessness:
St. Augustine (You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.)
Thomas Aquinas (The adequate object of the human intellect and will is all Being);
Iris Murdoch (The deepest of all human pains is the pain of the inadequacy of self-expression)
Karl Rahner (In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we ultimately learn that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony)
Sidney Callahan (We are made to ultimately sleep with the whole world, is it any wonder that we long for this along the way?)
James Hillman Neither religion nor psychology really honors the human soul. Religion is forever trying to save the soul and psychology is always trying to fix the soul. The soul needs neither to be saved nor fixed; it is already eternal, it just needs to be listened to.
Perhaps today the real struggle is not so much to accept sacred permission to befriend the wild insatiability of the soul. The greater struggle today, I suspect, is not to trivialize the soul, not to make its infinite longings something less than what they are. The soul is imperialistic because it carries divine fire, and so it struggles to breathe freely in the world. To feel and to honor that struggle is to be healthy.