{"product_id":"forgotten-among-the-lilies-isbn-9780385512329","title":"Forgotten Among the Lilies","description":"The author of \u003ci\u003eThe Holy Longing \u003c\/i\u003eexplores the debilitating obsessions that often dominate our lives and offers down-to-earth guidance for learning to leave our fears, anxieties, and guilt “forgotten among the lilies.”“Rarely do we taste the food we eat or the coffee we drink. Instead we go through our days too preoccupied, too compulsive, and too dissatisfied to really be able to be present for and celebrate our own lives,” Ronald Rolheiser writes in the introduction to this powerful collection of essays.\u003ci\u003eForgotten Among the Lilies\u003c\/i\u003e shows that there is a better way to find contentment and joy. Only by trusting in God’s grace and providence, Rolheiser argues, can we move beyond our obsessions and rejoice in what we have and who we are.With his trademark blend of insight, compassion, and honesty laced with humor, the author teaches that it is possible to experience freedom instead of anxiety, solitude instead of loneliness, and a generosity of spirit that returns to the giver far more than it costs.Praise for \u003ci\u003eThe Holy Longing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A master weaver is at work here. … I found my soul on every page. At least we have a guide who helps us know what to do with the fire of desire within us. At last a comprehensive, life-giving approach to sexuality. At last a dynamic understanding of how the paschal mystery plays in our own lives. At last a way to weave love for the poor and struggling people with the highest mystical love of God—I love this book.”\u003cbr\u003e—Sister Helen Prejean, author of \u003ci\u003eDead Man Walking\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eThe Restless Heart\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ronald Rolheiser examines the pain of loneliness and the meaning of our longing with compassionate precision. The book is not simply an exercise in personal spirituality—it also comes at a time when great social and political harm is done because many of us cannot endure and enjoy who we are in our loneliness. A much-needed antidote to the uneasiness of the times.”\u003cbr\u003e—Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, author of \u003ci\u003eLiving the Truth,\u003c\/i\u003e and coauthor of \u003ci\u003eSeasons of Grace\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ronald Rolheiser has emerged as one of the finest spiritual writers of our time. In this new edition of his earliest work, he tills the soil where the holy longing is cultivated, nurtured, and sustained: the lonely human heart. He holds the key to helping loosen the suffocating grip of loneliness so that our deepmost desires flourish and find rest in God.”\u003cbr\u003e—Michael Downey, Cardinal’s Theologian, Archdiocese of Los AngelesRONALD ROLHEISER, O.M.I., is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Holy Longing\u003c\/i\u003e, which has sold more than 150,000 copies, \u003ci\u003eThe Restless Heart,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Shattered Lantern\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a specialist in spirituality and systematic theology and writes a regular column in the \u003ci\u003eCatholic Herald\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in Toronto, Canada.1\u003cbr\u003e**\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRESTLESSNESS, SPIRIT and the MARTYRDOM of OBSCURITY\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe only hope, or else despair\u003cbr\u003eLies in the choice of pyre or pyre—\u003cbr\u003eTo be redeemed from fire by fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho then devised the torment? Love.\u003cbr\u003eLove is the unfamiliar Name\u003cbr\u003eBehind the hands that wove\u003cbr\u003eThe intolerable shirt of flame,\u003cbr\u003eWhich human power cannot remove.\u003cbr\u003eWe only live, only suspire\u003cbr\u003eConsumed by either fire or fire.\u003cbr\u003e(T. S. Eliot, \u003ci\u003eFour Quartets\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRestless Hearts Yearn for God\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWE ARE FIRED into life by a madness that comes from our incompleteness. We awake to life tense, aching, erotic, full of sex and restlessness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis dis–ease is, singularly, the most important force within existence. It is the force for love and we are fundamentally shaped by our loves and deformed by their distortions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShakespeare called this our “immortal longings” and poets, philosophers, and mystics have always recognized that, within it, there is precisely something of immortality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReligiously, we have surrounded this longing with chastity and mystique.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUltimately our restless aching was seen as nothing less than the yearning within us for God. Augustine’s interpretation of this eros was seen as the proper one: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe longing was understood religiously: Adam, missing his rib, longing for Eve, man and woman, woman and man, longing for a primal wholeness in God and each other. This was high longing, eros as the spark of the divine in us, the fire from the anvil of God imprisoned inside us like a skylark, causing hopeless disquiet!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the light of such divine restlessness we lived as pilgrims in time, longing for a consummation in a kingdom not fully of this world, caught, in Karl Rahner’s words, “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, inconsummate, but knowing that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn such a view, we pursued each other, embraced each other, and loved and made love to each other against the horizon of the infinite, under a high symbolic hedge. Love, romance, sex, and passion were sacred things, surrounded by much chastity and mystique.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday that hedge is lower, the mystique and the chastity are less. We no longer embrace against the horizon of the infinite and our aches are no longer seen as longing for the transcendent.\u003cbr\u003eInstead, for the most part, we have trivialized this longing, making it mean something much more concrete. The longing is for the good life, for good sex, for good successes, for what everybody else has, for the sweetening of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is little mystique in this. Plato, in his Symposium, tells of his students sitting around \"telling wonderful stories of the meaning of their longing.” Mystics, in their writings, tell of their deep longing for consummation within the body of Christ.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday we rarely sit around and tell wonderful stories of the meaning of our longing, and, ordinarily, there is little talk of aching for consummation within the body of Christ.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur stories are, for the most part, of yearnings more concretely channeled. It is a rare self–understanding today which lets one believe that his or her aches and yearnings are mystical. We are not accustomed to think in such high terms, our symbols are more humble.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur aches and longings are seen as directed toward what we can attain, practically, in the here and now, achievement, success, sex, limited love and enjoyment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is nothing bad about these things, but, in the end, if we define our deepest longings as directed toward them in themselves, we end up in despair. Eventually, we no longer believe that we can recover a primal wholeness through the embrace of another, the perpetuity of our seed, and the contemplation of God. We lower our sights. We trivialize our longing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe no longer see our longing as a congenital and holy restlessness put in us by God to push us toward the infinite. Instead it becomes a tamed and tame thing, domesticated, anesthetized and distracted. We are restless only in a tired way (which drains us of energy) and not in a divine way (which gives us energy).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so we should ask ourselves the question: What kind of lovers are we?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAre we still fired into life by a madness which lets us understand the insatiability of our hearts as a call to infinite love? Do we still see ourselves as pursuing each other, embracing each other, and loving each other against the horizon of the infinite? Do we still understand ourselves as meeting on holy ground with all the mystique and chastity that this implies?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr, do we believe that life is best lived without such mysticism, high romance, high eros, and high chastity? Do we still tell each other wonderful stories of the meaning of our longings or do we discourage each other from raising our eyes above the immediate?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo we cry with each other and support each other in the frustration of our incompleteness or do we give each other the impression that there is something wrong with us because our lives are inconsummate and our symphonies are incomplete?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo we still take our longings and emptiness to God in prayer or do we demand that life gives us, here and now, the full symphony?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo we lovingly and gratefully receive the spirit of our own lives, despite the tensions, or do we live in angry jealousy?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAre we loving against an infinite horizon or is our eros directed only towards the concrete sweetening of life?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat kind of lovers are we?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLonging Is Our Spiritual Lot\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eON FEBRUARY 12th, 1944, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank wrote the following words in her now famous Diary (Pan, 1968):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday the sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I am longing—so longing—for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd I do so long…to cry! I feel as if I am going to burst, and I know that it would get better with crying; but I can’t, I’m restless, I go from room to room, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, “can’t you satisfy my longing at last?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI believe that it is spring within me, I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally, I feel utterly confused. I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is in all of us, at the very center of our lives, a tension, an aching, a burning in the heart that is insatiable, non–quietable and very deep. Sometimes we experience this longing as focused on a person, particularly if we are in a love that is not consummated. Other times we experience this yearning as a longing to attain something.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost often, though, it is a longing without a clear name or focus, an aching that cannot be clearly pinpointed or described. Like Anne Frank, we only know that we are restless, full of disquiet, aching at a level that we cannot seem to get at.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen we look into history, philosophy, poetry, mysticism and literature we see an astonishing variety of ways in which this aching is expressed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor instance, many of us have read Richard Bach's little parable, \u003ci\u003eJonathan Livingston Seagull\u003c\/i\u003e. This book spoke deeply to millions of people. It is a very simple story: Jonathan is a seagull who, when he comes to consciousness, is not satisfied with being a seagull. He looks at his life, and the lives of other seagulls, and he finds it too small: “All a seagull ever does is eat and fight!” So Jonathan tries to burst out. He tries to fly higher, to fly faster, to do anything that might break the asphyxiating limits of being a seagull. He does not know what he wants, he only knows that he is hopelessly restless, that he must break out. Many times he crashes and almost kills himself, but he keeps trying.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a story obviously more of the human heart than of a seagull. It describes our search, our aching, our congenital propensity for the limitless, the free, the total embrace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn more abstract ways, this has been expressed in history: Philosophers speak of “a desire of the part to return to the whole”; mystics speak of “the spark of the divine in us”; the ancient Greeks spoke of something they called \u003ci\u003enostos\u003c\/i\u003e, homesickness (a feeling of never being at home, even when you are at home).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Vikings called it “wanderlust,” the insatiable need to push further and further into the horizon; Shakespeare talked of “immortal longings”; Gerard Manley Hopkins called the human spirit “an imprisoned skylark”; Augustine prayed to God: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”; e. e. cummings, poet, said: “For every mile the feet go, the heart goes nine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll of these feelings are in all of us. We are all deeply and hopelessly subject to dis-ease, incapable in this life of finding lasting rest. This restlessness, however, must never be seen as something which sets us against what is spiritual, religious and of God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn fact this hopeless aching and lack of ease is the very basis of the spiritual life. What we do with the eros inside us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe tragedy is that so many persons, full of riches and bursting with life, see this drive as something which is essentially irreligious, as something which sets them against what is spiritual. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our erotic impulses are God’s lure in us. They are our spirit!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe experience them precisely as “spirit,” as soul, as that which makes us more than mere animals. Our soul is not an invisible kind of tissue floating around within us, that stains when we sin and cleanses when we are in grace and which ultimately floats away from the body after death. Our soul is our eros, our minds and hearts in their deep restlessness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLiving the tension that arises out of that is the spiritual life. In that sense, everyone has a spiritual life—either a good one or a destructive one. Our spirits make it impossible for us to be static, we must move outside ourselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat movement outward (which is experienced as a double tension: a hunger which drives us outward and an attractive outside person or object which draws us outward) is either beneficial to us or destructive. When it is beneficial, we have a good spiritual life; when it is destructive, we have a bad one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is important, therefore, that we do not identify the spiritual life with something which is exotic (for religious fanatics), extraordinary (for professional contemplatives), or as something which is not for those who are full-blooded and full of eros.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is non–negotiable. If you are alive, you are restless, full of spirit. What you do with that spirit is your spiritual life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Martyrdom of Obscurity\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWE CRAVE FEW THINGS as deeply as self–expression.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeep within the eros that makes us restless and dissatisfied lies the incurable need to express ourselves, to be known, recognized, understood, and seen by others as unique and as having deep riches inside us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSelf–expression, being known and being experienced in our depth, is vital to living and loving. A heart which is unknown, unappreciated in its depth and lacking in meaningful self–expression is always a restless and frustrated heart. It is normally, too, a competitive and bitter one. But meaningful self–expression is difficult and full self–expression is impossible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the end all of us live in obscurity, unknown, frustrated. Our lives are always smaller than our needs and our dreams. Ultimately we all live in small towns, no matter where we live; and save for a few brief moments of satisfaction, spend most of our lives waiting for a fuller moment to come, waiting for a time when we will be less hidden.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom this frustration stems a tremendous restlessness and dissatisfaction. Each of us would like to be the famous writer, the graceful ballerina, the admired athlete, the movie star, the cover girl, the renowned scholar, the Nobel prize winner, the household name. But in the end each of us is just another unknown, living with other unknowns, collecting an occasional autograph.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur lives always seem too small for us. We sense ourselves as extraordinary persons living very ordinary lives. Because of this sense of obscurity we are seldom satisfied, easeful and happy with our lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is always, too, much still inside us that wants expression, that needs recognition, that feels that something very precious, unique and rich is living and dying in futility.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd in truth, seen only from the perspective of this world, much that is precious, unique and rich is living and dying in futility. Only a rare few achieve meaningful self–expression. There is a certain martyrdom in this. Iris Murdoch has said: “Art has its martyrs, not the least of which are those who have preserved their silence.” Lack of self–expression, whether chosen or imposed by circumstances, is a real death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike all death, however, it can be \u003ci\u003epaschal\u003c\/i\u003e or \u003ci\u003eterminal\u003c\/i\u003e. If merely accepted as inevitable it leads to bitterness and a broken spirit. If linked to the paschal mystery of Christ, if it is seen as an opportunity to enter the hidden life of Christ, it leads to a new ease in life, to restfulness; and it lays the ax to the root of our competitiveness, anger and bitterness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday we are called as Christians to the martyrdom of obscurity. Christianity always invites its adherents to martyrdom. To be a follower of Christ demands that one lay down one's life. But this takes various forms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Jesus and his apostles, as for many early Christians during the times of the persecutions, martyrdom meant physical death. They had to give up the possibilities that this life offered in order to remain true to a more distant possibility—permanent intimacy with God and each other. In dying they entered the hidden life of Christ.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat type of martyrdom is still being asked of Christians in many parts of the world, notably in Latin America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn North America and Western Europe, however, at least of many of us, a different kind of martyrdom is being asked. Our culture persecutes its Christians in a different way. Affluence and leisure have created a higher psychic temperature. These have focused us on interpersonal, sexual, artistic, athletic and scientific achievement. In a word, they have focused us on self–expression. In our culture meaningful self–expression is everything; lack of it is death. Yet it is this death that paschally we must enter.","brand":"Image","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299730346213,"sku":"NP9780385512329","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385512329.jpg?v=1767727580","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/forgotten-among-the-lilies-isbn-9780385512329","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}