“You complete me,” Tom Cruise whispers to Renée Zellweger in the hit movie Jerry Maguire.

It’s a great Hollywood line that underscores how we yearn for someone or something to complete us. We look for a person, place or thing to drive away our incessant longing. Yet, when we get them or it, we discover they’re not perfect, and so we yearn for something more. It seems we’re always seeking someone or something just beyond our reach.

I wonder if what we yearn for is Completeness—having all the parts to be whole. But what if we’re already Complete? What if we’re just looking in the wrong places—outside of ourselves?

Sister Maxine Shonk, OP, writes in her daily blessing:

“May God bless the one in you who is dissatisfied and longs for something more,
the hungry one who yearns for wholeness and meaning.
In your fidelity to your longing may God be revealed as the one who fulfills your greatest desire.  May the God of Completion bless you and make you whole.”

(Sign up for her Daily Blessings by clicking on this link: Daily Blessings).

I think Sister Maxine is onto something. She suggests our yearning is a natural part of being human. It’s the umbilical cord that connects our human hearts with the Divine Heart. And we long for the Divine because that’s what fulfills our greatest desire—that’s what brings us wholeness and meaning—the union of human and Divine.

Just like our hunger for food nudges us to eat, our hunger for God invites us to seek completion in him. Our human hearts long for the only One who can make us whole. And we become fully human as we seek and find the other side of ourselves: God.

The Creator—not Tom Cruise, not Renée Zellweger, not anyone nor anything else—completes us. The Creator is who we’ve been looking for. And no human being or material thing can provide an end to our yearning, because it’s God and the completion of our human hearts in the Divine we yearn for.

When we expect another person to complete us, we will always be disappointed because they, like we, are imperfect. So, maybe like John Travolta in the Urban Cowboy we need to stop looking for love in all the wrong places and find Divine Love, the Source of our Being, within ourselves.  

Other people and things are icing on life’s cake. But they can’t complete us. That’s our inside job, the inner work we need to do to find the Source of our longing. It is a Holy Longing, a Sacred Desire, which God has woven into our DNA so we can seek and find ourselves in God—the One who Completes us.

Practice:  Close your eyes and imagine whispering in God’s ear, “You complete me.”  
Then, listen with your heart. Do you hear the Lover of your Soul respond?

—brian j plachta
brianplachta.net