gladness and hunger

"God's calling is found in the place
where one's deep gladness
meets the world's deep need."
Frederick Buechner

I have been thinking about the word gladness for a while now. It's just one of those words that seems to get stuck in my craw for some strange reason and it won't let go.....kind of like the chewing antics of this puppy who accompanies me in the morning while I try to write. The word and her chewing are incessant, though I can't say I'm "glad" about it.........more annoyed as she tugs away at my sleeve! She seems glad and eventually I will too when her company isn't so disruptive.

Gladness or the term "Gladdens" seems to be a peripheral term you hear often connected to sermons or used when someones says grace. For some reason it resonates with more depth of feeling than it used to in my thinking. There's more to it.......

Gladness….a softening smile on the inside when you know you are doing exactly what God intended.

The essence of gladness can accompany even the most painful sorrow when there is unconditional love and belonging shared with another……..gladness is the soul touching clarity of a sense of oneness between someone in need and another who answers the calling. It is a deeply felt validation captured by the actions of one's acknowledgement and the other one's acceptance of it. It's like a warm caressing of intertwined souls.

Frederick Buechner encapsulates the yearning for gladness in the following paragraph where he describes the needs all human beings crave to fulfill. When I read this piece aloud, I find it so powerful............so bang on. In fact, I read it aloud to a friend at work yesterday and it precipitated a wonderful discussion on how lucky we are to be working in a place where we are given the opportunity to touch our own core where gladness dwells, and how often we can see and feel it in others.

"We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger."- Frederick Buechner

How true.... If we can look through our own lens at another person and realize just how much the same we are on the inside, the connection we feel....an intertwining caressing of two souls, will lead to feeling the essence of gladness. Sometimes it may accompany sorrow. It may force us to taste the parched emptiness of their hunger and leave us to feel impotent in what we can do to help them, but in that one instant where the connection occurs....that can never be taken away. One seed......just may be the food needed to share with another.

Our combination of life experiences may be vastly different.....it is the understanding and recognition that we are all filled with the same hunger which allows gladness to prevail. Gladness is the thanksgiving of grace.