Chasing the wind……

The phrase that stuck to my heart today is “ Destination sickness”. I discovered that in a Malayalam book by Fr. Bobby Jose Cappuchin. Name of the book is “Keli”!

The phrase is about the vacuum within each individual heart , a vacuum that cannot be filled with  worldly things. All the beautiful and desirable items in a hypermarket cannot satisfy that thirst within. Padding the five senses  too cannot satiate that yearning within. That exactly is what ‘destination sickness’ is. I googled and found a quote by Dr. Richard Halverson. He has explained  “Destination Sickness”as:

“…the syndrome of the man who has arrived and discovered he is nowhere. He has achieved his goals and finds they are not what he had anticipated. He suffers the disillusionments of promises that petered out – the payoff with the kickback! He has all the things money can buy and a finds decreasing satisfaction in all he has…He’s the man who has become a whale of a success downtown and a pathetic father at home. He’s the big shot with the boys in the office and a big phony with the boys at home. He’s the status symbol in society and a fake with the family. “Destination Sickness” – the illness peculiar to a culture that is affluent and godless.”

That is exactly what the Teacher in Ecclesiastes has termed as “chasing the wind”

 ^“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”Ecc. 1:14.

Anyway, the author of the book I read, has given us a solution too for this predicament; it is the solution which the Samaritan woman found at the well of Sychar. It is the Living Water, the source of Life. The only drink, the elixir that can quench all thirst....! 

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,  but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”John 4:13-14.

To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.- Pope Benedict XVI in Spe Salvi (Para 12)