Good question!! I got the idea from several places. (These are not necessarily presented in the order in which I came to this insight.)
- The first is Paul Tillich's work on what he called "the Method of Correlation". Very simplistically described, Tillich understood the human question to be something articulated by philosophy and the answer to be provided by Theology. More fundamentally, this meant that human beings presented a series of existential questions, while God was the One who constituted both their source and their answer.
- The second is Augustine's observation that our hearts are restless until they come to rest in [God]. In this insight, Augustine recognizes that we are made for God, and this in turn means that we feel that "made-for quality" as a restlessness to get home to God. In this too, then, God is both the source and answer to our yearning.
- A similar and supporting insight derives from the German notion of what is necessary to ask a question. One must know enough to be able to ask a question, and at the same time, one must lack knowledge appropriate to make the question necessary.
- This insight is linked in my mind with the notion of being "made-for", and so, with the sense we yearn so for God because we both know (and are known by) God and are somehow estranged from God (our knowing as well as our being known is partial and incomplete, or perhaps damaged and distorted, etc). Knowing God causes us to yearn for God.
- A major source of this insight stems from my experience of prayer, where I am always a seeker, always a listener callled to be open to God's work within me and my life, and God is the one who inspires and answers prayer. Two critical insights here have to do with the Lord's Prayer and the work done on it by Gerhard Ebeling and others.
- First, in the Lord's Prayer, we need to notice that every line except the opening invocation (where we call upon God by name) is a petition. In the prayer's two sections of petitions, we concern ourselves first with God and the things of God, and secondarily with the things or needs of humanity, but even so, every line represents us opening ourselves to that which only God can supply.
- Also, when Ebeling reflected on the invocation, he observed that in coming to learn to say Abba, Father rightly, the entire prayer has been prayed and answered because God has empowered this invocation, and God comes to us in the process. God himself is the answer to ALL sincere prayer.
- These insights pointed me back to the human person as the one who lacks, calls for what they lack and need, and, in praying sincerely, finds that God who wills to be Emmanuel (and wills us to be the human form of that as well) is the answer to that prayer, and so too, the answer that completes us.
- Another point came from the theology of Language Events, and especially the idea that human beings are language events ourselves. We are created by the words spoken to us and by the responses they empower us to become. At one point I came to see that it was possible for a person to be a "cry of anguish" or for them to become at another time, "A Magnificat of triumph or joy". It was not a large step to consider persons yearning for God as "questions" (or "petitions") seeking the single completing answer who would be Emmanuel.
- A final point that leads me to this whole idea is the sense that human beings are made for relationship. Relationship is a constitutive part of the living God-as-Trinity, and in Catholic Theology, it is a constitutive part of being human and imago Dei as well. Hermits, for instance, know well how critical relationships are to human beings being truly human because they know the difference between isolation and solitude! They well know how we yearn to love and be loved, and they know that Love Itself calls us to completion because they are people of prayer.
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