Lights On . . . Nobody Home

Thanks to giving my mind over to teaching responsibilites this week--Hinduism's Bhagavadgita and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury--I'm mining other minds for the time being.

In preparing for my Wednesday Night Live! class at Cherokee, I ran across these quotes from theologian Joseph Sittler's Gravity and Grace (1986):

St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: 'Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.' Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.

We are formed for God. . . . Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.

. . . This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.