Why we still haven’t found what we’re looking for

The fifteenth post in the series “What’s good about Christianity.” This is not about the truth or untruth of the Christian faith, but about whether believing certain ideas that are part of the faith is better than believing their opposites. Here we defend the proposition:

It is better to believe that the deep longing that is a universal human experience is evidence that our destiny is in a future existence with God than it is a sign of something wrong or missing in our lives that can be filled with goods or relationships.

Sehnsucht is one of those nearly untranslatable words that just seems to sound better in the original language, in this case, German. Sort of like gezellig in my father’s native tongue, Dutch. Gezellig, pronounced with soft, guttural “g”s, is best translated as “cozy.” But that one word doesn’t do it justice. Neither do the words “longing,” or “yearning” do justice to sehnsucht. Split the word into “sehn” and “sucht” and you get a better idea of what the word really means in German. Sehn relates to seeing, perceiving, to behold, to espy. Sucht is translated as “dependence,” “addiction,” and “sigh.” How could those meanings be related? To see addiction? Or dependence? To perceive a sigh?

But put those things together and you start to get a sense of the deep, meaningful experience that the single word tries to convey. We all experience it. That deep longing, the yearning for we know not what. A sense of hollowness, like in our heart there is a vessel needing…