longing

Review: The Language of the Soul

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The Language of the Soul, Jeff Crosby (foreword by Suzanne Stabile, afterword by James Bryan Smith). Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Summary: A survey of the deepest longings of the human soul, within ourselves, for our world, and for the eternal.

Saudade. A word from the Portuguese that, strictly so, is untranslatable. Words like longing, yearning, nostalgia, the burning hearts of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is the desire for something more that takes us into the realm of the spiritually transcendent. Jeff Crosby believes these longings are the beckoning of God, speaking to the language of our hearts.

Crosby has been reflecting on these longings for much of his life and gestating this book for the past fifteen years amid a busy career in publishing. In this work, he weaves his own experiences, the thoughts of other pilgrims, and the strands of music that have been another of his great loves to identify ten longings of the heart:

  • The longing for home
  • The longing for an undivided self
  • The longing for forgiveness received and extended
  • The longing for friendship
  • The longing for spiritual transformation
  • The longing for peace
  • The longing for community
  • The longing to be freed from unhealthy fear and anxiety
  • The longing for meaningful work
  • The longing for heaven, our hearts true home

It’s striking to me that these longings are framed by our longing for home. I think of how I treasure the hours I spend in the various comfortable and pleasing spaces in and around my own home and yet revel in images of beautiful homes (usually with a library, leather chairs, and a fireplace looking out on a beautiful vista). We call our home Rivendell, after the refuge of Elrond in the Lord of the Rings, the last homely house. It strikes me we all long for that house, which Crosby identifies with the longing for heaven that we glimpse in those “thin places” where heaven is barely veiled–a passage of music, a scene in nature, a description in literature, a poem.

In between, Crosby explores the longings that permeate our existence. He invites us to recognize our discontent with fragmented, divided lives and to pursue the solitude, silence, and wise direction that is the path to a seamless existence. He shares his own experience of a panic attack and the practices of examen to recognize the presence of God amid the anxiety-producing concerns of our lives. He likens the burden of our own transgressions and grievances toward others as a rock-filled pack that confession and forgiveness of ourselves and others helps us unload. He speaks of a marketing meeting with one of the leaders of the Empty Hands Fellowship for a book project that was set aside because of a family in need in an unhealthy, mold-filled shack, exemplifying the richness of community we often only long for. He speaks of anam cara friends who never “should” on us, and take that away from us when we try to do it to ourselves. And this just from half of the ten longings.

As I mentioned, song as well as scripture and literature has been important to Crosby and one of the treats is that he offers a playlist for saudade and for each of the longings at the end of each chapter. I haven’t created all of these playlists but was able to create a playlist on Spotify for his Saudade playlist and suspect one can find most or all of his recommendations on a music streaming service.

Along the way, we learn from many of the spiritual writers Crosby has worked with over the years of his publishing career, yet Crosby weaves these into his own “playlist” as well, exploring our longings and the practices that draw us to the one in whom our longings find their fulfillment. As I read, I felt I was listening to one, still on the way, and yet living a purposeful, increasingly seamless vocation moving joyfully toward his, and our hearts true home.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Dutch House

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The Dutch House, Ann Patchett. New York: HarperCollins, 2019.

Summary: Two siblings, Maeve and Danny, seek to come to terms with past losses of parents, and their childhood home, a striking three-story home built by a Dutch couple.

This story, it seems to me is about the longings of people who care for each other, often at variance with each other, resulting in wounds of estrangement, with which we may spend a lifetime trying to come to terms. So it is with siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy, born seven years apart. Their father, an aspiring real-estate tycoon has bought an extravagant house in an old Dutch neighborhood of Philadelphia, once owned by the Van Hoebeek’s, whose forbidding portraits and presence fill the house. Danny, who has never known anything else is the narrator of this account. Conroy’s wife Elna, who nearly became a nun, cannot come to terms with a place so extravagant. Her absences become longer until she leaves permanently, devoting herself to a life helping the poor, first in India and later, at various places in the United States, including New York’s Bowery.

Cyril’s ambitions, represented in his growing portfolio of properties leaves him vulnerable to the longings of Andrea, who becomes his second wife, bringing her two daughters. She has no problem seeing the house as hers. She relegates Maeve to a third floor bedroom so her daughter Norma can have her room. When Cyril, making repairs on one of his buildings, drops dead of a heart attack, Andrea expels Danny from the house, forcing him to live with Maeve. Soon they learn they have been cut out of their father’s company and assets apart from an educational trust for Danny and Andrea’s two girls.

Maeve already has a job as chief financial officer for a frozen vegetable concern and uses acumen to look after her brother, using the trust first to send him to Columbia, and then through medical school. She pours her life out for Danny, who strikes me as spoiled and self-absorbed, at times, to the detriment of her own health as a diabetic. It seems her longing is to be needed. Yet the question of what Danny wanted wasn’t asked. Finally after his medical training, he pursues what he wants–to be like the father he had followed around collecting rents and making repairs as a boy. That longing clashes with his wife, Celeste who thought she was marrying a doctor, anticipating the life of a doctor’s wife.

Meanwhile, Maeve and Danny continue to wrestle with the father and mother they lost, symbolized by the Dutch House. Repeatedly, they sit together, parked across the street wondering why their mother had left, why their father had so compromised their interests, and what had become of their evil stepmother. They try to understand their past and its hold on their lives. It turns out that they end up being versions of the parents they had lost.

I’ve often wrestled with what I’ve felt to be the unsatisfying endings of many of Patchett’s books. For one, I felt that Patchett wrote an ending I found to be satisfying. Not everyone lives happily ever after but there are real resolutions, real reconciliations. Danny, as narrator, grows in a trajectory of maturity and character. I’ll leave you to discover how Patchett accomplishes this. Like her other novels, she explores the unique ways in which families can be unhappy. In the resolution of this one, I found it satisfying in the authentic growth of the characters. I leave to you to discover how she does this and what you think.

Review: Bittersweet

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Bittersweet, Susan Cain. New York: Crown, 2022.

Summary: Describes the state of bittersweetness, where sadness and joy, death and life, failure and growth, longing and love intersect and how this deepens our lives and has the power to draw us together.

About ten years ago, Susan Cain published Quiet, helping the extroverted world discover the power of introverts and what they bring us all. In this work, Cain explores why at least some of us like sad songs, rainy days, and react intensely to art?

She helps us enter into understanding bittersweet by telling the story of the cellist of Sarajevo, who during the worst of the shelling, appeared every day and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. It is a beautiful, sad, and evocative piece that capture both the beauty of pre-war Sarajevo and the terrible loss of the war. This is bittersweet, this embrace of sadness and the longing for beauty, for something beyond our fractured existence. Holding together these seemingly disparate experiences, Cain believes is the pathway to “creativity, transcendence, and love.” Bittersweet can draw us together in the shared experience of longing for the transcendent.

Cain explores the sources of our longings for the good, the true, and the beautiful, the wonder of those moments and yet their transience. She contends that it is the place of creativity. She talks about how we live with bittersweet in a world of relentless positivity whose mantra seems to be, “be happy.” She offers an insight into the mental health crisis on university campuses, where everyone has to project a put-together, perfect Instagram image of effortless perfection that no one can live up to. She contends that our understanding of bittersweet can transform workplaces, where we understand the other side of fantastic success is the risk of failure, where allowing workers to acknowledge their struggles releases them to work more freely and productively, knowing that we’re all strugglers here.

The material of the third part on mortality, impermanence, and grief was the most thought-provoking for me. It is framed with the death of her brother and father from COVID-19 and the descent of her mother into dementia, a mother with whom she has had a bittersweet relationship. In between, she narrates attending RAADfest, a gathering of people into radical life extension, who are in revolt against aging and death. While Cain, like all of us would like to live longer, she doesn’t believe the pursuit of deathlessness will lead to peace and harmony, but rather the acceptance of mortality and walking together in it has the power to draw us together. She believes that the embrace of bittersweet is the way out of inherited trauma, when we face and embrace the pain in the lives of our forebears and live with gratitude for their resilience and the gifts they passed on to us.

I found myself reacting in several ways to this book. One was that I recognized a strength Susan Cain has is to name what is often an inchoate sense many of us have. While her “quiz” at the beginning of the book suggests some score higher on the bittersweet scale than others, anyone who has lived enough life, or even through a pandemic grasps this tension of sorrow and wonder, of longing and hope within which we live. Cain’s genius is to name it and give the lie to the American (and often Christian) focus on being happy.

Cain develops her ideas through a series of stories of travels around the world and interviews with a number of insightful people. She is a storyteller, and sometimes, it is hard to keep track of the larger story she is rendering for all the stories. Only in going back over the book for this review did I get any sense of the development of her ideas. With that, I also found the book somewhat repetitive as she makes again and again the point that bittersweet gives meaning, and creativity, love and union with others to our existence. It felt to some degree that this is the world she wanted to be so.

Cain describes herself as moving from an agnosticism to something different, not exactly faith or belief in a particular conception of God. Yet it seems in the end, in an attempt to identify with universal human experience, all she can do is believe in the longing for something more. She quotes C. S. Lewis from Surprised by Joy, noting that “we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an ‘inconsolable longing’ that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one” (pp. 53-54). Yet Lewis found the fulfillment of his longing not in longing but in God. I fear Cain’s argument is to embrace the hunger and the thirst, but not go on to where there is food and drink. I sense she believes that longing or bittersweet is its own satisfaction. I can’t help but wonder if there is a dark side to bittersweet not discussed here, the disillusionment and despair of a life of longing without finding. I found myself praying that she would find, and have the courage to accept, the “other” that she longs for.