The Missing Piece

10/27/22

File Under, "The Hunger"

I can't say this is true for everyone, but I suspect it is and the point being; "That we are born with the awareness that we are in some way incomplete. That the true bobb, or Mary, or Ralph, has gone through life like a nearly completed puzzle but for a piece that has yet to be found."

To say it another way, humans are incredibly complex beings, more like a 100,000 piece puzzle than those we put together on a long winter's weekend. As long as that piece is missing, the puzzle of who we genuinely are, remains just that, a puzzle. I think we are all born with an intense desire to find the missing piece and insert it into the picture in order that we may finally and become the complete person we sense we were meant to be. This desire to find the missing piece of ourselves takes us on the journey that lasts a lifetime and it is at the very roots of our creation myths, and religions.

For we now realize that the missing piece is not just some minor attribute that can be guessed at by looking at the larger portrait and then Photo-shopping in a blurry approximation of what appears would make the portrait complete. No, that just does not work, though we try it time and time again, always ending in disaster, but with each disaster a growing realization of the importance of the missing piece. Indeed the realization begins to dawn on us that, all along, the portrait has not been of us, but is of the missing piece with ourselves being merely a bit of the frame round about it. With each failed attempt, with each realization we have been pursuing a dead end trail to finding the missing piece, we return to the almost completed portrait and just sit and stare. We try with all the power we can muster to mentally will the missing piece into existence or maybe at least to recover the smallest fragment of a long buried memory of something deep in our past that if we could just remember it, it would provide the key to recovering the lost piece and the portrait complete.

This journey, like all journeys of importance, starts off with optimistic expectation the piece is already all-but-found, that we must merely look again about the cluttered and it will appear, or at the very most it is on the floor, at our very feet, and that all that needs to be done is to look under the table and Bingo, there it will be! The journey that takes a lifetime is never that easy. We search for that piece to fulfill our yearning to be complete, yet we look in all the wrong places. With each failed search we grow more and more discouraged and unless we return to the portrait and renew our memory of the missing piece's approximate description and attributes, we either abandon the search, or continue half-heartedly, armed with only the vaguest of memories of what we set out to find.

The quest to find the missing piece too soon morphs into looking for a substitute that we can lie ourselves into believing is the genuine sought-after missing piece. As in Aesop's Tale of the Thirsty Fox, the fox who after several failed attempts to jump high enough to taste the sweetest of grapes high on the vine, walks away muttering, "I will quench my thirst on the low hanging fruits as they are surely as sweet", (though he knew that were a lie). Now this is the state I find most of mankind, in the words of Galadriel; “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”― (Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring).

That actions have consequences, is a lesson humans have a hard time learning and a harder time remembering. The reality of The Missing Piece has gone from experienced to legend to superstition and is either now forgotten by most or discouraged by the many. We no longer value the culture that supported the pursuit of The Missing Piece. That culture has become weak, corrupted, misappropriated and manipulated. In too many cases deservedly so. This in turn has caused The Missing Piece (Union with God, with The Infinite, Completeness, it goes by many names) to go from most desired, to despised, to vehemently denied.

This union with our very Creator is as desired as much by Him as it is not by us. No amount of denial, unbelief, disbelief or rejection can erase from our hearts the realness of the longing for the missing piece, try as we might. Throughout the history of humankind, those who think deeply, those who ponder the subtleties others are completely unaware of, acknowledge humankind seems to yearn in deepest depths for this union. It seems to make no difference if the thinker believes or is a disbeliever in the actual existence of the Other as real or not.

It has been said humankind will worship whatever we think will satisfy our deepest desires (C. West). Our deepest desires are in most cases beyond words to describe. They are powerful. They are capable of shaking the very foundation of our soul whether we believe in the existence of a soul or not. Where we settled for momentary flashes of insight to see The Infinite, with The Puzzle complete, we now have timeless time to be in its presence. This deepest of longings being answered is experienced in the loss of self-identity that is found "When two shall be one" in bed of the wedded. In the Infinite's divine plan for his created, sexual union was meant as sacred sign given to encourage us to seek and lose our self into the Creator. When our sexuality is not allowed to complete this function, all our sexual needs, wants, and desires find expression elsewhere by focusing on (worshiping) the body itself. Remember, we worship that which we think fulfills our deepest desires. When we no longer remember, or have forgotten, or deny The Infinite, then we settle for worshiping the lesser gods and the act of sexual union devolves into abandoning ourselves to the cocktail of hormones that pulse through our body. Expecting our lesser god to fulfill the void left by absence of our true creator from participating in our relationships is probably as close as we can come to the very essence of what is idolatry. It is imperative that we remember behind the worship of lesser gods is a Journey to find the Missing Piece ending prematurely.

bobb