In one of his many essays, the English writer C. S. Lewis, who died nearly fifty years ago, November 22, 1963 (the same day, I might add, that John Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died as well), pondered the meaning of the German word Sehnsucht. Although Sehnsucht is generally translated as a longing or wishing viscerally for something, Lewis chose to describe it as a “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.”
     At first glance, we might wonder how we can long for something we “know not what.”  On the other hand, I suspect all of us have found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, wishing for something, something intangible, something unimaginable, maybe even something unspeakable, yet something we feel that we must have, something we believe we cannot live without—but we do not always know why.  We may not be able to describe it fully, we may not be able to define it completely, but we know—we sense—that we long for and want it.  It’s mysterious, it’s elusive, but it’s real, too.
     Some, including Lewis, called this longing a longing for God.  Others, those who perhaps do not share Lewis’s Christian sentiments, would call it our natural human bent, our natural human inclination to know more than what we know at the moment.  Maybe, in their own way, both sides are right.  Unless we long, we are not really human.  But unless we long for something beyond ourselves, we are not human, either.  If we never longed for anything beyond ourselves, we would be complete.  But we all know that we are deeply fractured and damaged beings.  We are far from complete.  So we long.  As the Buddhists might say, that which is impermanent cannot be permanent.  Yet permanence, lastingness,and wholeness are those for which we all long.  For only what is permanent can satisfy the longing of what is not.