“Stewarding the Night.”Advent Week #1: Longing
Maybe longing is directive…
"Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting--that is, of hopefully doing without--will never experience the full blessedness of fulfillment."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger
"Theologian whose legacy took on a deeper dimension when we was imprisoned and executed for participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler."
Advent season assumes internal anguish. To wait is to ache.
Every human feels it. Something missing, unresolved, incomplete. I know you know what I mean. There are times when we feel that ache down to the bone.
David puts words to it in Psalm 63:1,
You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.
Waiting provokes longing.
The season of Advent represents the anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. Considering the fact that Jesus's coming is first mentioned in Genesis, that's a long time of yearning. Looking. Waiting.
To make matters more complicated, God stopped speaking to his people through the prophets. He certainly didn’t stop moving and working, but he stopped communicating. You and I can jump between the Old Testament Prophets and Luke's account of the Christmas story in the same sitting, but the painful reality for the generations living during that Intertestamental period lasted 400 years. 400 years of silence. I'm guessing you have felt that, too. The silence of God.
‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.’
—Amos 8:11-12
Silence provokes longing.
Those walking in darkness were aching for the light. They may have misplaced their longing, but it was there.
Hunger is part of the human condition. Not just physical, but emotional, vocational, relational, and spiritual. We long for more than what is. And as a result, we grieve. Maybe our tears are lodged deep down and refuse to come out, or maybe they surface with ease, sometimes out of nowhere. We long. We grieve. They seem to go together.
The marketplace capitalizes on the psychology of longing. This time of year, companies throw their best tricks at us. They pull on us continuously. The more open we are to their influences, the more absorbed we are by their chants. Our aches have been exposed, and they send us sniffing. The seduction of their messages deceptively invite a landing place for our hunger.
"Not happy? We have a solution." "Can't seem to shake off that restlessness, Amazon will work for a little bit." We sniff for that which will make the longing go away. What adds to it, we are entangled by the hollow, "Every desire you have should be fulfilled," and, "If you aren't happy, there's something wrong; it needs to be fixed."
Desire turns into demand, and misplaced longing inevitably leads to ravenous craving. And craving doesn't quell.
The insatiable drive for personal happiness makes long-term longing nearly impossible to endure. Even if I don't want to be mastered by it, I don't know how to turn the valve off.
But there is another direction for longing. Not happiness and Hallmark sentiment, but communion with Creator God.
Yearning is about connection. Yearning is about God; it's about home.
We can gain the whole world, yet be painfully restless. Our lives may look like a Target ad, and still we grasp. There are countless stories of those who testify to this. And our lives testify to it, too. Jesus wasn't born to be our life coach. He didn't come to give us an instruction book or to help us plan for a life of success and safety.
He came to be with us. Immanuel...
And ultimately, this is what our yearning is about. To be loved. To be seen. To be found.
Longing carries a loneliness with it. And loneliness is part of the human experience. We aren't meant to solve it, but direct it (*). We take this emptiness to the source; the incompleteness serves as a compass providing direction for our aches.
*I am not talking about the kind of loneliness that results from isolation and depression; that is exactly when we need to invite others in for help.
Yearning is orienting.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:28).
We often miss God's words in Jeremiah 29,
"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart" (13).
And Moses penned this powerful reminder as a warning to Israel about misplaced longing...
Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the Lord your God...
Deuteronomy 8:12-18a
The direction for this yearning? "Remember the Lord your God..."
Advent is a reminder that the ache we carry has only one place to go; we take it to a person.
“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Our longings can be painful at times. Wrenching, even. They have been for me; they have been for people I know. I find hope in how Sue Monk Kidd describes it: "Fertile emptiness." These are the hollowed-out places where the Spirit of God hovers. He hovers over the emptiness with intention and creativity, perfect wisdom and empathy...uninterrupted loyalty and unconditional love.
He hovers with resurrection power.
Our hunger, as odd as it sounds, is a mercy. When we take notice of it (and we ask God to help us spot it for what it is), it will stop us and lead us through the desert to the Streams of Living Water. Our longing, that rises up in the darkness, invites us to keep company with the Spirit of God.
Under the dark sky, in the utter silence of the middle of the night, no sound but their own breath, the Shepherds were startled out of nowhere by the stunning light, thrown to their knees by the sight of thousands of angels. Their news was quenching news. "God has made a way for you. He is here to save you. He is redeeming the whole world." These words change everything. Their longings, like ours, their desire for something more, their ache for things to be made right one day...all of it had a place to root: A Savior, who is Christ, the Lord.
Every one of us lives with a holy longing. As Frederick Buechner says, "Listen to your life..." Our lives will answer a fundamental question: "Where do you go with your ache?" As we sit in stillness and silence, in the quiet that we must create for ourselves, we will find HIM there, generously welcoming us with all our aimlessness, greed, grief, irritability, pride, joylessness, and split-off parts...for yearning is not insatiable craving, it is about connection with Jesus; HE is our home.
May your yearning this Advent season be a signpost for your soul.
“I felt that I had been dropped in the abyss of unknowing, into a stark confrontation with my own pain and wounds. The darkness seemed to encircle me on every side. At times I felt abandoned and afraid inside its roundness. At other times the darkness felt strangely nurturing, swollen with the mystery of becoming.”
-Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
A Prayer if you have no words:
Lord, Jesus. There is a space inside that holds much longing. Some days it feels distant, yet always present. But there are days when it rises up with a palpable presence and beckons me to notice. I wonder if this is your call. You came as a child; you came to die so that the separation between us would be dissolved and we could be close. I don't want my longings to lead me in the opposite direction of you and miss out on the gift of your presence. I sit here now with the ache; I receive you.