Our heart is constantly seeking a place to rest, and we know it needs rest, but where can our Spirit lay its head? The disposition towards rest is infallible and immutably part of our nature, it is the interior orientation of our being. Yet, it is called to rest in the ultimate good, as its end. This is where we go wrong. Our mind and affect incline this agenda to rest in what we fallibly think is ultimate. For some it is pleasure, others power, or wealth, or honor. For some the natural good of friendship, others a natural marriage, others excessive liberty. For some, there is no real thought put into it, but the mere incompetence of allowing one’s daily impulses to dumbly guide our wayward life.
For the Church, as said by St. Augustine so perfectly, our rest is in God alone. Our will rests in its docility to His, our affect in His beating and wounded heart, and our mind in His wisdom.
So many are exhausted and frustrated that their soul has yet to find rest. There is a deep, hidden sadness that can’t be articulated because the ache within the deepest recesses of the soul can only be numbed by one’s incomplete, temporary experiences of happiness. Yet that longing for something eternal, steady, deeply satisfying, true, and good, evades us. And that is God, for whom without we remain eternally un-quenched, unfulfilled and lost.
When we know and will Him as our last end, we do not find rest, but rather the restless spirit of pursuit spoken of in the Wisdom of Solomon clamors in our flesh, is consumed within our mind, and our will enabled by grace directs itself with complete abandon to Him. With panting, docility and unrest, we reach out to Him who from heaven reaches down to us, and only upon our death do we find that final rest to which we have become awakened to as promised by the proclamation of the Gospel.
Photo: Bart Larue, Unsplash / PD-US
