In the concluding sequence from the movie Before Sunrise (1995), the camera sweeps over all the places where the newly-in-love Jesse and Céline recently spent the night. The places—where director Richard Linklater had the characters talk about life so immediately and openly in a tentative attempt to get to know each other—are filled with a melancholic emptiness. The design of these scenes, their mise-en-scène, not only evokes a melancholy that contrasts and creates tension against the new love the viewer has witnessed for nearly two hours, but also raises questions about longing and what is contained in the hope for a continuation.
As I write this text, the anniversary of my father’s death approaches, an intense battle with cancer that lasted less than a month, and I am struck by how the hospital room he lay in echoed this romantic film sequence. It is hard not to envision a sweeping camera over an empty hospital bed just as Linklater let the camera quietly glide over Vienna’s empty park benches, streets, and train stations. As the only Catholic in my family, my time in the hospital room was marked by a surreal duality: The secular world I grew up in met another newfound world of an afterlife. The hospital room’s mise-en-scène, with its empty bed, shared in many ways the melancholy of the film.
Longing in a Secular World
I am a convert to the Roman Catholic Church; from the beginning, I instinctively felt an aversion to the idea that religion is something that makes life easier. This sentiment—that religion should be the easier alternative to an empty, secular world—has always struck me as both wishful thinking and directly incorrect; the secular world is in numerous ways easier to live in. What is primarily offered in this horizontal worldview are pure endings: Things begin and then end. Life without a predetermined telos offers security, a certainty that religion unsettles.
It is difficult to hope in a secular world where all notions of something “after” or “supernatural” are placed in the category of wishful thinking or evolutionary mechanisms.
I have experienced a similar situation but from the opposite perspective. When my older sister died in 2015, I experienced this simplicity. Here, I must be careful; her passing was not easy for my family, and death never comes with clear answers. What I mean by “simplicity” is very specific: My view then was that when she died, her story ended. The secular world offers a transition from the present moment to the process of grieving something that no longer exists; the film is over, and now you can remember the film’s most important scenes. An ending also means an opportunity to mourn, to remember, and to begin imagining life after someone’s passing. Everyone experiences grief and loss differently, and I do not want to trivialize anyone else’s experience. Something felt off for me. My sister’s death meant a long period of dissatisfaction, like a piece of music that ended with a suspended note—a note I couldn’t articulate at the time, but one that lingered in the background like tinnitus.
Longing and Nostalgia
Is longing easier in a secular world? It seems easier, but the absence of hope so quickly transforms longing into nostalgia. (As a scholar of religion, I am cautious with terms like “religion” and “the secular world,” but given the personal nature of this text, I hope the reader will tolerate their broad use.) It is very difficult to hope for something that has ended; it is difficult to hope in a secular world where all notions of something “after” or “supernatural” are placed in the category of wishful thinking or evolutionary mechanisms. However, there remains a persistent problem: Everyone hopes. It is impossible to avoid constantly feeling that the hope for something else breaks in, knocks on the door, tugs at the hem. This problem gives rise to a recurring feeling—something the comedian and musician Bo Burnham’s Covid-anxiety-filled film Bo Burnham: Inside captures in a chorus: “There it is again, that funny feeling, that funny feeling.”
The longing I felt after my sister’s death—and here I dare to generalize longing as a phenomenon in a broader, more general sense—had nowhere to go. The longing and the yearning had instead to flee into nothingness. The longing’s desire to go somewhere indicates what the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor described as being “haunted by Christ.” One’s longing is haunted by a need for someone to explain, carry, and transform it, taking it beyond the circle of one’s own memories of the deceased. To be haunted by longing means that the yearning seeks to become something more than one’s memories—something beyond mere nostalgia, a longing to transcend one’s own images of a bygone time.
In the darkness, God shapes the soul; without hope, existence remains night, never dawn.
Ever since I was little, I have been fascinated by dilapidated houses, old mills, and stories about poor workmen and washerwomen’s lives: I am by nature nostalgic and cannot avoid wondering what lives the walls now covered with peeling wallpaper have housed. But it is so easy for everything to end here; in memory, in speculation, in my own construction of the lives that have been lived. Likewise, my memories of my sister easily become nostalgia—a longing back. Longing back to my sister, to my father before the hospital bed slowly faded his contours, and to a feeling that one’s innermost longing gets stuck and always ends in this often sentimental word: hope.
Carrying Hope: From Thérèse of Lisieux to Maurice Blondel
The faith journey offers a narrative of hope beyond the horizon of mortality, a journey that does not promise easy answers but requires a confrontation with darkness, suffering, and ultimate mystery. Hope is only possible to carry if one has something or someone who receives the hope, who carries it too: The motif of—like Jesus—carrying one’s cross. Jesus himself says in the Gospel of Matthew: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24).
But to follow and carry one’s cross also means experiencing total darkness. The Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) experienced this total darkness and feeling of abandonment when she lay dying of tuberculosis at age 24. The young woman described this despair as a fog that made it impossible for her to see or remember her homeland and her faith in God. This fog prevented her from resting and filled her with the fear that hope was merely a dream. It shook Thérèse to the core, making her question if everything would end in endless nothingness. Despite this innermost despair, she kept hope: She ran inwardly to Jesus. It is the hope in Christ that makes it possible to transform what John of the Cross calls the “dark night of the soul” from something unbearable into the soul’s renewal toward God. In the darkness, God shapes the soul; without hope, existence remains night, never dawn.
Charles Péguy’s (1873–1914) portrayal of hope in Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1912) initially feels somewhat amusing. For Péguy, hope is like a little child—a little girl who leads her older sisters, Faith and Love. It is naive, yet true: Hope, like a child, moves Faith and Love forward. In this way, we must always, like the young Thérèse and Péguy’s little girl, become like a child again. We must draw strength for the coming days from the night, knowing that, like a child in the dark, we find comfort in the presence of a parent unseen, whose reassuring light—like Jesus’ night lamp—calls us forward even when we cannot yet see it. I must change my mind somewhat: The secular worldview offers pure but incomplete endings.
The Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel’s (1861–1949) phenomenological analysis of human action in his dissertation L’Action (1893) provides a compelling philosophical foundation for understanding human striving. Blondel examines how, in all human actions, there is an inherent drive toward something beyond oneself—a pull toward the absolute, which he terms l’unique nécessaire. For Blondel, this is not just a theoretical idea but a deep existential truth: Every action, no matter how small, is ultimately oriented toward something transcendent. The act of hoping, of turning one’s hope away from the self and embracing something greater, is a way of transcending what Blondel calls egoïsme, or self-centeredness. To hope is to acknowledge the profound (sometimes unbearably lonely) reality that human existence is constantly pulled toward something beyond the immediate and horizontal—toward a realm that lies beyond the fog of uncertainty and the darkness of despair. This pull, for Blondel, is not only a philosophical abstraction but the very essence of human life: always reaching, always yearning for something greater.
The choice between secular longing and religiously inspired hope can be seen through the lens of existentialism, contrasting the atheistic worldview of Jean-Paul Sartre with the Catholic philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. Sartre’s existentialism offers no transcendence; it asserts that life is inherently meaningless and human beings must construct their own purpose amidst an indifferent universe. For Sartre, existence precedes essence, and the human condition is defined by isolation and the burden of freedom, with little comfort or direction beyond the self.
In stark contrast, Marcel’s Catholic existentialism invites us into a journey of faith, emphasizing the concept of homo viator—the wayfarer, the pilgrim on a quest. Unlike Sartre, Marcel believes that human beings are not alone in their search for meaning. We are accompanied by a divine presence that transforms suffering into a path of hope and redemption. In this framework, longing is not futile nostalgia but a yearning for union with the divine. While Sartre’s existentialism is driven by the despair of a godless world, Marcel’s is marked by the possibility of grace, where even in the fog of doubt, one may find strength and purpose through Christ.
So, after this impressionistic reflection on the difference between secular and religiously inspired longing, we can again return and interpret these empty scenes, the places of the lovers Jesse and Céline, my father’s deathbed, and the longing and yearning for a grounded existence. Perhaps it would be best presented as a choice: a choice to see all these empty places where longing and ultimately nostalgia reign—places “haunted by Christ,”—or to run through the fog like Thérèse. Following the Church does not mean receiving tools to win the culture war, defeat the “woke,” or secure an easier existence. It is not about seeking victory in the worldly battles of the day but about embracing a deeper, more difficult path. It means that—with courage we cannot muster on our own—we bear the world’s misery with faith and grace, navigating life’s suffering in the spirit of Thérèse of Lisieux against doubts and despair. It is about facing the darkness with the hope that, even in our deepest moments of uncertainty, we are not alone. It is in this haunting in a secular world where the Christ-centered does not yet reign that hope, like the apostles, can fill us with the strength to carry the cross. People who have lived and died, whom we miss, may still dance like fading silhouettes in our memories with the hope that one day these shadows will be filled with life again.