OK, raise your hand if there was ever a time in your life when you thought to yourself "If I could just have/meet/become/get _________ then I would be totally happy."Now raise your hand if you subsequently got/met/became that ___________ and thought to yourself "But wait.... If I could just have/meet/become _________ then I would really be totally happy."
The rock band Extreme once sang: "There's a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you, and this hole in my heart can't be filled with the things I do…"
I remember hearing this song and running out to grab it when it first debuted in 1991 as a "single" - a little cassette tape with just the one song on it. Old school, I know. Right off the bat my spiritual sense was tingling, like Spiderman. "Oooo, why yes, I have one of those holes in my heart too," I thought to myself. "Seems like everything I think will fill it just fails to satisfy. I always want more!"
Life's ambition occupies my time
Priorities confuse the mind
Happiness one step behind
This inner peace I've yet to find
Wow.... Is this not the soundtrack of our lives? Are we not all starving for inner peace? Look at the self-help sections in bookstores. I just did a google search for "self help" and it gave me 95,300,000 websites to visit. Seriously, who's got that kind of time?
Thanks be to God I've come to realize a simple truth that will save me all of that searching: Self-help is useless. I can't help myself. I'm helpless. I can't "pick myself up by my own bootstraps." That's physically impossible.
This hole in my heart.... this longing for More, this sehnsucht that sometimes seems to pull my heart out of me in a crazy mixture of joy and pain can only be filled, quenched, and completed by the Maker of my heart.
If I'm not blind why can't I see
That a circle can't fit
Where a square should be
I think most of us have come to realize this second truth; that nothing can fill our hearts... that is, no-thing can fill our hearts. That our hearts are made for relationship, for other persons, and ultimately the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the Three Who are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
How long it takes for many of us to come to this discovery... for us to make this journey out of self, to empty ourselves so that God might fill us? Sometimes a lifetime. But all along we should keep up the journey. Keep singing the songs of our generation, but with a heart that stops at nothing to find the truth that really fills us. We've got to scratch below the vinyl so to speak, until we come to the core, to the very heartbeat of Music itself, to the Sanctuary where all Song is born. There, finally, we'll find true harmony.
Here are the lyrics from another melody:
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him. The watchmen came upon me
as they made their rounds of the city:
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
I had hardly left them when I found him whom my heart loves.
I took hold of him and would not let him go...
- Song of Songs 3:2-4
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