Sacred heart

I took a day off the internet and tv yesterday. This meant changing my habits and actually putting the computer away but by the end of the day I felt lighter. It was like taking a day off bread. I'm not going to give up the internet (evidently) any more than I'm going to give up emergency toast, but it's cleansing once in a while. A little ritual is a good thing.
I led a Mother's Day themed service at church - meh - so afterwards decided I deserved to take myself out for some very nice fish and chips. I spent the rest of the day reading The Restless Heart by Ronald Rolheiser. I happened to spot the book at the university library and I ended up reading the whole thing that day, cover to cover. I'm not sure I've ever done that. It's a book on loneliness which might seem like an odd choice for that day but lately I'm a believer in facing off one's d(a)emons with vim and vigour and I knew Rolheiser to be a writer I appreciate. I just hoped very very much that he would end with an encouraging word.
It's a pleasingly well-organized book, and sensibly and coherently written. Having read - and appreciated - quite a few 'soul psychology' books, it was nice to be back in the fold with a Christian perspective that I could get on board with. In fact it really was a revelation in perspective for me - encouraging indeed. It contributed greatly to my overall feeling of lightness by the end of the day; not a clever twist of words to make me feel temporarily better but a reversal of thinking that made me feel more at peace with my present and my future.
In summarizing Thomas Aquinas' contribution to the discussion, he writes:

We are built for the infinite, to be in perfect intercommunity with God and others. We hunger for this, long for it, and constantly and thirstily reach out for it. But, when we do reach out, we can meet and touch only particular persons and objects. These can fulfil us to a point, but never completely...Accordingly, we go through life always somewhat lonely and dissatisfied, restless and unfulfilled, as we perpetually reach out and seek that radical unity with God and others for which we were made.

In such a perspective, loneliness becomes a good thing, a valuable and necessary force in our lives. It is the force that drives us outward to keep searching, to keep reaching, to not give up. It is the force that keeps us dissatisfied with pseudo- and partial solutions, with hedonistic and short-term answers. It is the force that keeps us dynamic, making us restless and dissatisfied when we are stagnant.

Ronald Rolheiser ~ The Restless Heart
(I forgot to mention the weirdest thing. Rolheiser quotes from 'The Thorn Birds', a racy, epic paperback saga by Colleen McCullough that I just happen to be reading right now. Isn't it weird when things like that happen? Maybe it means I'm going to marry a priest. Or have his love-child and have him bugger off to become a cardinal, as the tale would have it.)