“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we come to understand that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.”
Karl Rahner wrote those words and to not understand them is to risk letting restlessness become a cancer in our lives. What does it mean to be tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable? How are we tortured by what we cannot have?
We all experience this daily. In fact, for all but a few privileged, peaceful times in our lives, this torment is like an undertow in everything we experience. Beauty makes us restless when it should give us peace. The love we experience with our spouse does not fulfil our longings. The relationships we have within our families seem too petty and domestic to be fulfilling. Our job is inadequate to the dream we have for ourselves. The place where we live seems boring in comparison to other places. We are too restless to sit peacefully at our own tables, sleep peacefully in our own beds, and be at ease in our own skins.
When we feel this way, our lives will forever seem too small for us and we live them in such a way that we are always waiting, waiting for something or somebody to come along and change things so that real life, as we imagine it, might begin.
I remember a story a man once shared with me. He was forty-five years old, had a good marriage, was the father of three healthy children, had a secure, if unexciting job, and lived in a peaceful, if equally unexciting neighborhood. Yet, to use his words, he was never fully inside of his own life. Here’s his confession:
“For most of my life, and especially for the past twenty years, I have been too restless to really live my own life. I have never really accepted what I am – a forty-five- year-old man, working in a grocery store in a small town, married to a good woman, aware that my marriage will never fulfil my deep sexual yearnings, and aware that, despite all my daydreaming, I’m not going anywhere, I will never fulfill my dreams, I will only be here, as I am now, in this small town, in this particular marriage, with these people, in this body, for the rest of my life. I will only grow older, balder, and physically less healthy and attractive. But what’s sad in all of this is that, from every indication, I have a good life. I’m lucky really. I’m healthy, loved, secure, in a good marriage, living in a country of peace and plenty. Yet, inside of myself I’m too restless to ever fully appreciate my own life, my wife, my kids, my job, and the place where I live. I’m always at some other place inside of myself, too restless to really be where I’m at, too restless to live in my own house, too restless to be inside of my own skin.”
That is what the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable feels like in actual life. But Rahner’s insight is more than diagnostic, it is prescriptive too. It points out how we might move beyond that torment, beyond the cancer of restlessness. How do we do that?
Precisely by understanding and accepting that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. By understanding and accepting that the reason we are tormented is not because we are over-sexed, neurotic, ungrateful persons who are too greedy to be satisfied with this life. Not that. The deep reason is that we are congenitally over-charged and over-built for this earth. Built that way by God. We are infinite spirits living inside a finite world, hearts made for union with everything and everybody but meeting only mortal persons and mortal things. Small wonder we have problems with insatiability, daydreams, loneliness, and restlessness! We are Grand Canyons without a bottom. Nothing, short of union with all that is, can ever fill that void.
To be tormented by restlessness is to be human. Moreover, in accepting that we are human and that therefore, for us, there can be no finished symphony this side of eternity, we can become more easeful in our restlessness. Why? Because we now know that everything comes to us with an undertow of restlessness and inadequacy, and that this is normal and true for everyone.
As Henri Nouwen once put it: Here, in this world, there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. Rather, in every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance.
Peace and restfulness can come to us only when we accept that limitation within the human condition because it is only then that we will stop demanding that life – our spouses, our families, our friends, our jobs, our vocations and vacations – give us something that they cannot give, namely, clear-cut pure joy, full consummation.