Longing and Waiting

“Advent is the season for waiting, but we need to know what kind of waiting is God is asking from us. Why “waiting”? Our response to God is always one of waiting. It is always he who initiates. We need his grace first. We are at his mercy.” - Fr. Johnny Go, SJ

If we try examine our feelings this time of the year, we somehow encounter the feeling of loneliness, sadness or a little bit melancholic. We can blame it perhaps on the cold weather, the Christmas songs and carols, or even the simple decoration that would remind us about Christmas past. There is indeed a certain kind of longing, whether a person, place, thing or an event. This longing can be described like a restless, consumed by a thirst that cannot be quenched and a fire that will not be stilled. In every cell of our bodies and in the very DNA of our souls we ache for someone or something that we have not yet known, ache in a way that leaves us too dissatisfied and restless to live fully inside our own skins. Our lives always seem too small for us. Moreover, and this is the key, this is God's doing. God is the hand behind this "intolerable shirt of flame.”

I guess it is normal to feel lonely these days. And advent is all about loneliness, but loneliness is a complex thing as we know. 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. I remember in one of our Theo classes, Jesuit theologian Karl Ranher, talked about loneliness like “the only in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable do we know that we are more than the limits of our bodies, our present relationships, our jobs, our achievements, and the concrete situations within which we live, work, and die.”
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.

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. Perhaps this is the meaning of it, the time of the year we are longing for someone, for a place, or something. Advent is about getting in touch with our longing. It's about letting our yearnings raise our psychic temperatures so that we are pushed to eventually let down our guard, hope in new ways, and risk intimacy. And at middle of this experience of loneliness, we can do nothing but wait. Wait because there is nothing we can do about this loneliness, it is something greater than us. Wait for Him to ease the loneliness of our hearts, the fill us with His love for us to be complete.

Advent celebrates human longing. It asks us not to deny our longings but to enter them, deepen them, and widen them until we become insane enough for the light so that, like the butterfly, we open ourselves to undergo a metamorphosis.