If we lose this, we lose all.

   In the deepest place of ourselves, there resides our desires and our longings. It is the place that although flooded by the daily musings of work and family and friends still remains unfettered. The problem: is that most of the time the flood of our daily musings is too deep to wade through. It is a place I am longing to return to.
    Throughout my life, I have done what I wanted. I never wanted for my own path because I was always on it. But, I do believe it has lead me to the place where I am now: "a whitewashed tomb." Sounds harsh...but I see myself as though I could be on the path of the pharisaical. And I mean this: that my mind is bound up in doctrine, but my heart has lost its desires and longings.
    When I found my faith, I found a renaissance within myself, a "rebirth." And, for a long time, I lived this; I fed this; I breathed this rebirth. However, somehow, as of late, I have denied these longings. Do I know when it began? Perhaps with the death of Andrew. Perhaps when I decided I didn't need the Church. Perhaps when I decided to live my faith on my own. However it happened...it did.
    There is something that only my heart recognizes and it is the pure, unadulterated faith of my Catholic self. I am not so much as saddened that I have seen the flame dwindle, I am more gladdened that I am desirous of its return. But, what does it take? I started reading (again) the Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God. This brilliant book, from the moment I started again with the opening quote of, "Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been weakened by the touch of God within them," has captured me. It has given me the chisel and hammer that I need to whittle away at the hardened shell I have constructed around my vulnerable heart.
     What has captured me is this quote by C.S. Lewis. And while it is long and perhaps a bit tedious to read it is the kindling my heart needs:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all!

  If you read that, then you see what I mean! You see this "something" he calls it, this "secret attraction" or the "secret signature of each soul." But, that something can only be one thing...the furious longing of God. In me, in that deepest place of me, in my "heart strings" where lies my true self, I am searching. God has been gracious to remind me that although given the knowledge of the Truth of the Church, I still am so far from where I should be. 

   I am grateful that I haven't lost this. Or, perhaps that I have the knowledge that I haven't completely lost this. Just a few weeks ago we had Holy week. That week stirred up within me a longing to find again the source of my heart's desires. It stirred up with in me to find my Abba. To find my Father. Because while he is, I am. If I lose him, I lose all.