We Will Long Until We Return
There is a question that might be the human question: if Love is both where we come from and where we are going, why does the middle, the actual lived life, so often feel like estrangement from it?
I've been sitting with some threads that feel honest, and I want to offer them not as a tidy theology but as something more like a map drawn while still walking.
This is structural hope, not sentimental hope. I want to say that at the outset, because what follows could be mistaken for comfort, the kind that tries to soften the real difficulty of being human. It isn't that. It's something harder and more durable: the possibility that the structure of things itself is oriented toward Love, regardless of how lost we get in the middle.
Freedom requires distance. For Love to be genuinely chosen rather than simply undergone, there must be the real possibility of turning away from it. The middle is where that freedom is exercised, where consciousness develops enough self-awareness to move toward Love deliberately rather than automatically.
Gurdjieff's sleeping humanity is not fallen humanity. It is humanity that hasn't yet woken to what it already is. The estrangement is not punishment. It is the condition of real choosing.
Nicolas Berdyaev, whom Ken Wilber singles out as one of the few theologians to have seen this clearly, understood the Fall not as humiliation but as exaltation. Involution, the descent of Spirit into matter and forgetting, is the necessary first movement of evolution, the return of Spirit to itself with full consciousness. We had to leave Eden. Not because we failed, but because staying would have meant never choosing, never descending far enough to find our way back.
Eden before the Fall is innocence, but innocence is not yet wisdom. It is not yet love in the fullest sense. It is simply not-yet-having-chosen. The expulsion is not punishment. It is graduation into a harder and more magnificent story.
The Fall is the story of a Being great enough to descend into full separation, full forgetting, full freedom, and still find its way back, not because it had no choice, but because it chose.
That is what Berdyaev means by greatness, and it reframes everything that follows in the middle.
A love that could not be refused would not be love. It would be gravity.
The middle is where development happens. Teilhard de Chardin understood evolution as requiring friction, complexity, and apparent disorder before greater consciousness emerges. The middle is not a failure of Love but Love working through resistance. Ilia Delio's image stays with me: life eating through the shells of the dead. What looks like loss and estrangement is often the very mechanism of deepening.
This reframes everything. The human journey is not a tragedy with occasional glimpses of redemption. It is a deliberately structured arc, consciousness moving through freedom, through the experience of separation, toward a chosen return that means something precisely because it was chosen.
We confuse Love with its substitutes. Much of what gets lost in the middle is not Love itself but our images of it: the borrowed mirror, the inherited self, the validation we seek from outside because we haven't yet found the source within.
We lose the counterfeit and call it losing Love. The real thing was never absent, only obscured.
Ken Wilber calls this the great game of hide-and-seek, with Spirit as It. At every level of the journey, Spirit is not absent but hidden; not destroyed but obscured; not abandoned but forgotten. The agony of the middle is that the forgetting feels permanent, like a falling away that cannot be reversed, but obscured is not the same as gone. The game is already rigged toward finding.
Matthew Fox's theology of Original Blessing points toward the same structure. The first word spoken over creation is blessing, not condemnation. Love is not something we lost and must earn back. It is what remains beneath every layer of forgetting.
The mystics who came closest to this, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Cynthia Bourgeault, tend to say that the apparent darkness and estrangement of the middle is somehow necessary rather than accidental. The Sufi tradition calls it ghayba, the divine hiddenness, the idea that God withdraws so that the soul can discover its own longing and turn toward the source freely rather than by compulsion.
There is an image I keep returning to: a child longing to be chosen by her parents. That longing, its urgency, its vulnerability, its willingness to keep reaching, is not a weakness. It is the template for the soul's relationship to God.
Like a lover, God wants to be chosen freely, and that only happens if we choose first. Even in a baby, there is reciprocity. Developmental psychology calls it serve and return, the caregiver responds to the infant's bid for connection, the infant learns that reaching out produces a response, that love is reciprocal rather than unilateral. Without that early serve and return, something in the capacity for connection remains undeveloped.
Perhaps what feels like God's absence in the middle is simply the ball in our court. It is not an abandonment, but an invitation.
"What if this pattern exists not only between the soul and God, but within every layer of human relationship?"
The serve and return dynamic doesn't stay contained to the personal. In Family Constellations work, love and belonging move through systems across generations. When a parent couldn't return the child's bid for connection, because of their own unresolved grief, trauma, or absence, the child adapts. They serve differently. They learn to reach in ways that might get a response, even a partial one.
The theological parallel holds: our capacity to reach toward the Divine and receive in return is shaped, at least in part, by what we learned early about whether reaching produces connection. Which means that healing those early relational patterns is not separate from the spiritual journey. It is part of it. The nervous system learning that reaching produces return. That love is genuinely reciprocal. That the serve will be met.
I am drawn to these questions not only intellectually. Certain forms of love have been among my greatest teachers, leading me through estrangement into a deeper understanding of what Love itself might be.
There is a journey I know from the inside, a love that I was certain was the destination, until I arrived at the realization that it is the doorway to God. At the time it felt like the whole thing had gone wrong. In retrospect, the estrangement was not a mistake. It was the condition for the choosing. The long circuitous route was the route.
I don't offer this as instruction. Each path is its own, but it clarified something: that Love as the Omega means everything is already moving toward it, whether consciously or not. Some souls return quickly and with awareness. Others take longer, but the direction is built into the nature of things.
Rumi's reed crying from separation will find the reed bed. The prodigal son will eventually come to himself and turn toward home. The invisible diaspora will find its inner homeland.
We will long until we return. That's the whole of it, really.
The longing itself is the evidence of the connection. You cannot long for what has no relationship to you. The very ache is proof of the thread.
Love never ceases drawing us toward itself, not because free will is an illusion, but because Love as Omega means the arc bends toward it. The longing doesn't end the journey. It is the journey, until it resolves into the thing it was always pointing at.
This is what I mean by structural hope. Not the hope that things will feel better, or that the estrangement won't hurt, or that the middle won't be long and strange and sometimes bewildering, but the hope that is rooted in the nature of Love itself: that nothing is wasted, that the distance was necessary, that the choosing is real, and that the return, when it comes, will mean something because of everything it moved through to get there.
Where in your own life has Love seemed furthest away, and where has it found you again?
