Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

As the deer pants for streams of water,
    so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
    When can I go and meet with God?

• Psalm 42:1-2

How lovely is your dwelling place,
    Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
    for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
    for the living God.

• Psalm 84:1-2

Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
for he satisfies the thirsty
    and fills the hungry with good things.

• Psalm 107:8-9

“From at least the age of six, romantic longing­ Sehnsucht-had played an unusually central part in my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing.”

• C.S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, preface to Dymer

Sehnsucht is German for an intense yearning, longing, or craving.  It is more specific in craving than fernweh, which is basically the opposite of homesickness (far away sickness?).  In other words, a longing to be out there, but not specifically out “where.”

I could probably write a mini-series on such Sehnsucht quotes from C.S. Lewis.  I wonder if he simply had the longing at age 6 for Joy, or did he know the word Sehnsucht by that age.

I chose the Scriptures because they went beyond longing to “panting for.”  That takes us closer to what Lewis is saying here.

When I was six-years-old, all I knew about life in general was from what you could learn on a turkey farm.  Well, that and going to church and Sunday school.  I was not reading yet, having just finished kindergarten, but on my sixth birthday, I received my first Bible from my paternal grandmother, a retired one-room schoolhouse school marm.  And looking at the modern definition of school marm, she was strict, but she was my “Mammy” and I never saw her as priggish.  I have written before about how she gave me a very unique Bible and she told me that she knew I was going to start reading and I would not know the words.  So, she taught me to read with a dictionary next to the book I was reading.  Of course, I did not know the words that I was reading in the definitions either, but that Bible is the first book, other than school books, that I ever read, a lot read to me until I could read better.

But life was going to school, learning to read, teaching the baby turkeys (poults) where the water was and the feed tray, and playing with beagles.  I was not up to the challenge of swinging on a muscadine vine in the forest like Tarzan.  That came a few years later.  I think there was some thoughtful wishing associated with those vines.  And a few time, there was wishing that I had not chosen the one I chose as a tree ran up out of nowhere to be right in my way.  Splat! You don’t cry when that happens because you did it to yourself.

But in reading C.S. Lewis’ early books that he desired to read, I will admit that Sherlock Holmes and the Hardy Boys took me to exotic places.  Then there were the classics.  Note: My grandchildren have no idea what a book report is and I doubt if they have ever read the classics, but the more wild the adventure, the better.  And I developed a distaste for the movies about the classics.  I would much prefer the world that elicited Sehnsucht in my mind.

I wrote early on with this blogsite about my sense of direction, and how I rarely get lost.  I may not know where I am, but I have an idea about how to get to where I need to go.  And getting back to where I started is rarely a problem.  Why?  I read Old Times on the Mississippi and Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.  In one of them, he explains where Mark Twain comes from, but that he was instructed on his first trip up the river to stand at the stern and see where in the river that the captain positioned to steamboat.  On the way down the river, it was his turn to steer and the captain would not tolerate him running aground on a sandbar.  I always checked the rearview mirror, just snapshots along an unfamiliar road so that I could recognize the landmarks on my return trip.

So, maybe not at six, but early in my life I wanted to travel unknown highways, outwit the bad guys, and maybe save the damsel in distress, but then again, it would be decades before I knew what to do if romance slapped me in the face.

While I had Sehnsucht.  I think my wife had Fernweh.  She always wanted to be somewhere else, and I think she found the right somewhere else.  The Scriptures point to it.  Fernweh might mean anywhere else, but Sehnsucht adds definition to that somewhere.  And Paradise in God’s presence is the only place where those words lose meaning.  There will be no thoughtful wishing.  We will have arrived.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.