The Holy Longing (Fifteenth Anniversary Edition), Ronald Rolheiser. New York: Image, 2014.

Summary: A discussion of Christian spirituality rooted in an understanding of desire and the incarnation.

I owe the discovery of this book to my sister, who first asked me if I was familiar with the work of Ronald Rolheiser. I’m so glad she asked because it led to the discovery of this work on the nature of Christian spirituality. In it, I discovered a writer able to express profound ideas in clear terms. It reveals to me someone who has lived through to the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Far from the denial or suppression of desire, Rolheiser recognizes that desire, or eros is a fire within us and central to our spirituality. He expresses it in this way:

“Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world.”

We struggle with imbalance that is rooted in several divorces: between religion and eros, spirituality and ecclesiology, private morality and social justice, the gifted child and the giving adult, and the divorce by contemporary culture of its paternalistic, Christian heritage. In ensuing chapters he will reconcile those divorces, restoring balance. He begins by articulating four essential aspects of Christian spirituality: private prayer and private morality, social justice, mellowness of heart and spirit, and community as a constitutive element of true worship. He contends that these need to operate together and that where one or more is absent, one will have an unbalanced and unhealthy spirituality.

He then comes to one of the most important contributions of the book. He roots our spirituality in the incarnation of Jesus. It is precisely this God in human flesh aspect of Christ that distinguishes a truly Christian from merely theistic (and I might add gnostic) spirituality. It shapes how we allow God to put flesh on our prayers, how we reconcile in families and communities, how we receive God’s guidance through community, and indeed understand the crucial role flesh and blood communities play in our spirituality.

The final part of the book then elaborates various aspects of this incarnational spirituality that channels desire toward life-giving ends, He explores ecclesiology and very practical reasons we need the church. He unpacks the paschal mystery, and how death and resurrection plays itself out in our spiritual journeys. He elaborates on why we need both private morality and social justice. He offers a searching exploration of the connection of our sexuality and spiritualty–actually the disconnect of the unconsummation we all experience even of sexuality at its best and how treating it as a sacred gift, bounding it in marriage, allowing ourselves to be formed in marriage and parenting, and guarding the gift in chastity allows us to live in a creative and transformative tension.

His final chapter concerns spirituality for the long haul. He offers several commandments:

1. Be a mystic, cultivating the life of prayer
2. Sin bravely–that is to honestly bring who we truly are to God rather than to pretend to what we are not.
3. Gather ritually around the Word and break the bread
4. Worship and serve the right God–to accept God’s forgiving embrace and His delight in us.

There is a wealth of riches in this work. It is written for the ordinary parishioner and not the spiritual leader, although its probing exploration of desire and living honestly before God speaks powerfully to the “professionally” religious. Finally, it focuses us neither on a list of practices, though these follow, but on Jesus, our Incarnate Lord and what it means to live incarnationally–as desiring human beings following Jesus. This is a book to which I want to return.