Advent is about getting in touch with our longing. It’s about letting our yearnings raise our spiritual temperatures so that we are pushed to eventually let down our guard, hope in new ways, and risk intimacy.
John of the Cross had a similar image: Intimacy with God and with each other will only take place, he says, when we reach a certain kindling temperature. For too much of our lives, he suggests, we lie around as damp, green logs inside the fire of love, waiting to come to flame but never bursting into flame because of our dampness. Before we can burst into flame, we must first dry out and come to kindling temperature. We do that, as does a damp log inside a fire, by first sizzling for a long time in the flames so as to dry out.
How do we sizzle spiritually? For John of the Cross, we do that through the pain of loneliness, restlessness, disquiet, anxiety, frustration, and unrequited desire. In the torment of incompleteness our spiritual temperature rises so that eventually we come to kindling temperature and, there, we finally open ourselves to God and one another in new ways. That is an image for advent.
Advent is all about loneliness. Nobel Prize winning author, Toni Morrison describes it this way: “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smoothes and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seems to come from a far-off place.”
All of us know exactly what she is describing, especially the latter type, the roaming kind of loneliness or what I like to call “noisy brain” that haunts the soul and makes us, all too often, too restless to sleep at night and too uncomfortable to be inside our own skins during the day.
What we learn from loneliness is that we are more than any moment in our lives, more than any situation we are in, more than any humiliation we have experienced, more than any rejection we have endured, and more than all the limits within which we find ourselves. Loneliness and longing take us beyond ourselves. How?
Loneliness and longing let us touch, through desire, God’s ultimate design for us. In our longing, the mystics tell us, we intuit the kingdom of God. What that means is that in our desires we sense the deeper blueprint for things. And what is that?
Scripture tells us that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, of simple bodily pleasure, but a coming together in justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, that is what we ache for in our loneliness and longing: oneness, intimacy, completeness, harmony, peace, and justice.
Our loneliness and longing are a hunger and an energy that drive us, always, beyond the present moment. In them we do intuit the kingdom of God.
Advent is about longing, about getting in touch with it, about heightening it, about letting it raise our spiritual temperatures, about sizzling as damp, green logs inside the fires of intimacy, about intuiting the kingdom of God by seeing, through desire, that our world bears the imprint of God.
Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: “All my longings lie open before you, Lord; my signing is not hidden from you. (Psalm 38:9).
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that this Advent we learn that our loneliness and longing are not to be feared but God’s ways of bringing us closer to the spirit of harmony and peace.
