Advent is the season of longing – of recognizing the ways in which our lives are not complete and making room for the one who can complete us. Maybe God works these longings into our lives more acutely during the holiday season. If God made humans to be restless and to long for a completeness not known during our earthly lives (as Scripture and tradition have always suggested), then maybe God also initiates this restlessness and longing more now en masse than at any other time of the year. This week, this Advent, I am recognizing that God initiates the longings I experience. And he initiates this longing through glimpses.
There were moments on my 30-day retreat of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius where I glimpsed fullness of life with God. At times, I felt immersed with God, completely connected with him. I glimpsed God’s overwhelming love for me exactly as I am. I glimpsed God’s delight in all of creation, including me. I glimpsed total love, peace, harmony, fulfillment. I say I glimpsed these things not because they were superficial – no, my experiences have (hopefully) sunk deep into the marrow of my bones. Instead, I say I glimpsed life with God because even as I felt God with me, I knew I experienced only a small sliver of who God is and also a sliver of life that will come for me when I die and become forever joined with him.
I’ve been back from my retreat longer now than the entire retreat lasted. While I still feel moments of God’s overwhelming love for me, these moments are becoming less intense and less frequent. Given this, I realized this past week that I am grieving. I am grieving the strong connection I felt with God during my retreat. I long to feel that which I felt/glimpsed during my retreat. But, I also see that if God had not given me glimpses of loving connection with him, I would not notice its absence now. I would not yearn for it so deeply now. By giving me glimpses of a better life, God opens me to imagine, to desire more.
These glimpses of a better life fuel our desires, fuel our vocation, fuel our longings. We can imagine life where young men do not go into shopping malls and shoot people. We can imagine life where we get along peacefully with family. We can imagine better friendships, better romantic relationships, better jobs, better grades. At the very least, we can imagine life where the gifts we want to buy are affordable, stocked on the shelves and available in stores without long check-out lines. Why? We so easily imagine these things because God gives us glimpses of these things in our daily life – moments when we feel peace with family, moments when our jobs or classes are going perfectly, moments when we feel alive and well and right with the world.
In the past I thought I originated my longings, authored my desires. This Advent I am learning firsthand how God gives me both the glimpses of fullness I experience as well as the longings for more. God gives me the glimpses and the longings. Alpha and omega. Beginning and end.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
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1 comment:
I enjoyed you reflection on the glimpes that you see and how God reveals Himself to us. I like to think that we see the glimpes and get joy in things in ways that are unique to us - ways that we can see God in the ways he wants us to use our talents and nature. If we see those glimpses in relationships, perhaps it is in relationships that he invites us to advnace the kingdom. The glimpses may be the window to the will of God - unique for each of us - as unique as the nature that He set in us from the beginning.
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