The Illness of Denial, the Longing for the Divine

We are starving for the divine. That hunger is everywhere. It shows itself in the restless way people chase meaning, in the empty shrine of materialism, in the way despair creeps in when nothing seems to matter. This hunger has been so twisted that longing itself is treated as foolish. We are told that awe is weakness, that amazement is for the gullible, that to hunger for the divine is proof of being unsophisticated, naive, or stupid. 

That is the illness of our time: the shaming of holy awe and the yearning it creates. The denial and ignoring of what is most true in us and this life. The seeking of that which is disconnected that promises a fulfillment that is impossible.

The Hunger We Cannot Erase

Awe already lives in the chest of those who feel the glory of a sunrise, who know there is more than the hyperrational and disconnected can see. The world has demanded that awe be hidden, disguised, laughed off. Yet it remains. Because awe is not decoration. It is the divine brushing against our skin.

Longing is the pulse of relationship that refuses to be severed. It is the voice of the soul knowing it belongs to something vast, intelligent, and alive.

The Field of Denial

We live inside distortion. I call it the Field of Denial, and it has enthroned power, accumulation, appearance, and intellect as the primary measures of worth. It has dressed up arrogance as sophistication. It has declared that amazement must be explained away, that mystery must be conquered, that longing for God is stupidity. It emphasizes self in such a way that the explorations that are allowed lead us to navel gazing and self-absorption to the degree that “consciousness” is a billion dollar industry. 

This is disease.

True Intelligence is braided. Reason and intuition. Analysis and astonishment. Self within ecosystem.To exile awe is to amputate half of knowing. To banish holy longing is to banish soul from the world.

Reason without permeability calcifies into arrogance. Intuition alone lacks grounding. Together they create the conditions for contact with the divine.

We need that relationship. Not as metaphor. Not as poetic notion. As reality.

The divine is not a belief system. It is not a category of thought. The divine is the architecture of existence itself. The living Intelligence we are born from, held within, and continually addressed by.

Humbled Amazement

There is a particular flavor of awe that opens the human soul to the divine: Humbled amazement.

This is awe that does not inflate itself, that does not imagine that knowing more makes the Mystery smaller. It multiplies as understanding grows. Every step into trying to understand the fabric of existence reveals more vastness, more beauty, more coherence.

This is awe of the heart-mind. It bows without submission. It shudders without fear. Humbled amazement is the ground of belonging. It is the mark of a human being aligned with the immensity of life.

The Necessity of Divine Relationship

Human beings cannot live right without contact with the divine. We are not designed for severance and denial. We are permeable beings meant to be in conversation with gods, spirits, nature, and intelligences that sustain us. We are meant to feel ourselves walking inside the body of the divine, immanent, everywhere. Without this we fall into loneliness, distortion, and despair. Without them (the intelligences that sustain us) the Field of Denial takes hold and all that remains is cynicism and power trips as surrogates for connection.

To be human is to be in relationship with the divine. It is life itself.

Longing is the pulse of relationship that refuses to be severed.

The Cost of Severance

The fracture is everywhere. The arrogance of pretending we are supreme. The despair of believing we are cut off. The endless ways people numb themselves when nothing seems to matter or they are overwhelmed by complexity of utter nonsense. 

The Field of Denial has not made us wise. It has made us sick. Clever without coherence. Educated without amazement. Connected to information but severed from relationship.

We are taught to laugh at awe. To treat longing as childish. To smother amazement. And the cost is written across our bodies and societies. Exhaustion. Collapse. War. Confusion. Emptiness.

The Evidence of Our Times

Our times are the evidence of what happens when distortion compounds upon distortion. When denial becomes the air we breathe. We can no longer listen to the land. We no longer honor the wisdom and guidance alive all around us. Instead, we place ourselves at the top and center of existence and call it progress.

This is what distortion looks like at scale. This is what denial looks like at scale. Forests stripped bare. Waters poisoned. Violence repeated in endless cycles. The loneliness of entire societies, cut off from belonging. The worship of intellect as if it were wisdom, when it is only a fragment, the Lesser Intelligence, brittle and arrogant.

Entire nations leverage power as if life itself were theirs to command. Their reach crosses borders, poisoning waters and air alike. No one escapes the consequence.

None of us are outside this distortion. We wear its fabric on our skin, drive its engines, eat from its fields. To live now is to be entangled in systems that distort our relationship with the divine, though the divine itself remains everywhere, waiting to be met.

Even religion, which should have been a vessel for contact, has become a tool of distortion. Modern religions often reinforce the severance, teaching a God apart, demanding allegiance to hierarchy that disfigures relationship. This is not holiness but evidence of pollution.

There was a time, not idyllic or untouched by suffering, but more direct. Less distorted. We felt the divine everywhere. In the turning of seasons. In the nearness of animals. In the tremble of the body when beauty pressed close. Relationship was natural, not this indulgent complexity we call sophistication. And guidance was intimate, not mediated.

The Greater Intelligence is the mind of the heart. It knows how to bow in amazement, how to listen, how to be taught. It is this Intelligence that restores us to right-relationship.

Returning to the Circle

Longing for the divine is to hunger for the circle of life itself. The stars wheeling overhead. The breath of the wind moving across land and sea. The migrations of animals, the language of birds, the rooting of trees. We are born inside this intelligence. It is not outside of us. It is everywhere, speaking in countless forms.

When we deny the circle, when we step out of it and try to place ourselves above it, distortion multiplies. To dominate life is to forget that we belong to it. To fracture the circle is to fracture ourselves.

To return is not nostalgia. It is restoration. It is remembering that intelligence is not housed only in the human mind but in weather systems, in rivers, in soil, in the night sky. Belonging is the natural state. Denial is the distortion.

Rejoining the circle does not erase our modern entanglements. But it reorients us. It places us again among the animals, the plants, the waters, the stars. It restores awe as the language by which we hear the divine in all things.And this opens different possibilities. Possibilities otherwise unavailable. Possibilities that do not exist outside of intimacy with life. 

Longing for the Divine - the Invitation

Let your longing exist. Let the awe pull you. Let yourself be guided and met and grown and tested and taught.

Awe and longing are the doorway home.

This is the invitation. To restore longing as strength. To know that the divine is not distant but existing everywhere. Already whispering in the marrow. Something we can encounter and seek more of.

Do not explain it away. Do not dismiss it as unsophisticated. That dismissal is the illness itself.

Longing is an innate quality of what we are because we are of the divine. We are meant to live in connection with it, to be taught, to make our way back.

Amazement is intelligence. Adoration of existence is natural. Awe is the threshold.

Step through. Want more? Subscribe to Holy Trouble blog for posts, offering notifications, and little surprises.