Yearning

Here are the questions for you to ponder. Find the one that ‘hooks’ you the most. Then live with that question over the course a month. Think about it, journal your responses, share your musings with friends and family.

•   What did you yearn for in your childhood? Was the yearning fulfilled or unfulfilled? Are any of your childhood yearnings with you still?
•   What did you yearn for once you reached adulthood?
•   What do you yearn for now?
•   How do you recognize yearning? What does it feel like in your body?
•   What do you do with your yearnings?
•   Has yearning ever led you astray? What has your yearning done to your life and its horizons – broadened them or crippled them? Sometimes we try to feed our hungers or quench our thirst with the wrong thing. It takes time to learn what we truly yearn for. Where are you in this process of learning?
•   What is the relationship between yearning and happiness in your life?
•   Can you distinguish yearnings that come from within versus yearnings that are imposed from outside yourself? Which yearnings, if followed, might make your life more fulfilling, might help you live as the you that you long to be? Which yearnings torment you or prevent you from living the life you wish to live?
•   Do you feel spiritual yearnings? What do they feel like?
•   If you were to draw or paint or sculpt your yearnings, what would it look like?
•   What yearning brings you to church?
•   Have you ever felt a yearning to feel one with all that exists? Was that yearning fulfilled? For how long did it stay with you?
•   Has yearning ever made you feel like a mystic? Does it have a dimension of “otherness” to it? How do you make sense of and articulate that for yourself? Do you need to articulate it? Or just listen to it more deeply, and let it more fully lead your life?
•   How did you overcome a yearning denied? We’ve all yearned for something but seen it slip through our fingers or remain forever out of reach. The longing to have a child. The dream of starting our own business. A lover that didn’t love you back. How did you heal after a yearning denied? What are you doing to continue to heal?
•   How has yearning affected your efforts toward social responsibility and eco-justice? Does it act as a motivation or an impediment?Credit for these questions and materials with which we explore each month’s goes to the Soul Matters Program designed by Reverend Scott Taylor, with help from all his contributors, notably, this month, Reverend Karen Fraser Gitlitz in Saskatoon.