The great nineteenth century thinker Schopenhauer believed that our lives personify longing. Recently, I felt a strange dose of this longing while trapped in the soul-killing world of a shopping mall. 

   Wiling away two hours walking linoleum-clad corridors (waiting for a pair of glasses to be repaired) I entered a Nordstrom's store. There I discovered suits priced at $3000 and mannequins with sharp points for heads. 

   At the risk of sounding stuffy, I wondered: Do we fight wars so that people can go mall-shopping? Do caregivers save lives so the resurrected can mall-shop?

   Imprisoned amid headless mannequins, I wondered if I could live the rest of my life never re-entering such heartless places. 

   John O'Donohue tells us that Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde" describes "our huge craving for love." Where do we find the answer to such a craving? 

   "The music of Wagner has a magnificent Architecture of longing," O'Donohue writes. Presumably, as we listen to his genius, our longing finds a home where we may lay down our burdens.

   Instead, most of us head for the mall. 

   At the mall, I discovered a father who (perhaps desperate) had decided to keep his young children occupied by showing them a cartoon on his iPhone (below right.)

   Down the linoleum, I spotted a long line. "What are you waiting for?" I asked. "Oh my God, the new iPhone is inside," an excited couple told me. "It is, like, so awesome!"

   How do iPhones and $3000 suits meet our longing? Do they keep us so pre-occupied we can ignore harder life choices? Frankly, I admit that I find it more diverting to watch a football game than to consider the meaning of my life.

   A store front offered an answer. "Couture your life," the pink writing on the store window said (below.)

   "That's it!" I thought. "I'll just 'coutoure my life.' Once my clothes are custom-designed, longing will dissipate like morning fog.'"

   Alas, the store was dedicated to women, as was the one next door where the slogan said, "Burberry your body." Naturally, wrapping oneself in Burberry would, at least, deliver warmth and a feeling of being a cut above those wearing Target specials.

   "I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness. When I at times tried to forget all this O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing."

   The writer is Beethoven. He longed not for a Burberry or a suit, but for the restoration of his hearing.

   Had there been shopping malls in the mid-nineteenth century perhaps Beethoven could have drowned his sorrows there. Instead, in the midst of complete deafness, he composed his world-changing Ninth Symphony. Who has not felt an answer to longing amid his "Ode to Joy?"

 -Reverend Erie Chapman