Glimpses

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.

Gratitude

The leftovers are long gone, but our thanks-giving deepens within us as we begin Advent preparations and Christmas celebrations. Afterall, isn’t that what lies beneath our hustle and bustle, giving thanks for the blessings in our lives? The parties, the gifts, even the holiday cards – these are small tokens we give to people as a reflection of the gratitude we feel for their participation in our lives. And let’s not forget the extra charitable giving so many of us do this season as we become acutely aware and grateful for our material security. Even as we feel harried and tired and stretched thin, deep down, we still recognize that virtually everything we do for others during the holiday season is an expression of gratitude for them.

But, gratitude is not just for a season. It is also a characteristic of a fully functioning person. Martin Seligman, founder of the field of Positive Psychology, along with a research team of top psychologists, identified Gratitude as one of 24 primary strengths of character that humanity has valued across time and culture. Gratitude is a sense of joy and thankfulness when we receive from others. In their international survey published in 2004, Gratitude was one of the five most common character strengths endorsed by virtually all 54 industrialized nations studied, including Americans. We are not simply a people who set aside one day every year to express thankfulness; we value and cultivate it year round.

As we should. Gratitude is not a mystery of our faith, like the incarnation or the resurrection of Jesus. However, gratitude is one of the primary means by which we touch all the mysteries of our faith. The Latin for gratitude, gratia, means grace. When Christians use the word grace, we do so as a proxy for the word God. Grace refers to the tangible, felt presence of God in one’s life. Through grace/gratitude we become fully human, connect to our deepest core self, become more capable of reaching out to others, and join in fellowship and intimacy with God. Gratitude brings the recognition that I am not the author of my life, that I do not control the goods I have or even who I am. Gratitude is recognizing that all the goods of life and even life itself are gift, that someone beside me has given to me every single thing that I know to be good. Scripture talks about each of us being created to praise and serve the Lord. Gratitude is praising the Lord, thanking God for whatever good-ness, large or small, we see in our lives.

Advent is a time of preparation, preparation for the coming of the Lord into our hearts and into our world. And gratitude is one of the primary ways we prepare for and open ourselves for Jesus’ coming. Yes, we can easily bemoan the fact that this time of year is too commercial, too busy and too little associated with God. But, when we instead deepen our sense of gratitude, we open ourselves to grace, to Emmanuel, to God-with-us.

Advent in July

Every Monday this month, a group of us have met to celebrate Advent. Advent in July! Advent is as important a preparation for Christmas as Lent is for Easter. And yet, with all the gift buying, decorating, end-of-year parties and deadlines, Advent often gets as much of our attention as children give to their least favorite present. Take the advent wreath. I make a pledge every year to get it out and set up so I can begin Advent with the first Sunday, but never seem to get everything in place until almost 10 days later. While I do pray using my wreath, I can’t seem to do it every single day. By the third week, I am burning candles outside of my prayer times in an effort to get the candles to “look right.” Looking right means burning some of the candles so they are all the proper Advent length, with one short purple and one medium purple candle plus a rose candle that has to be taller than the medium one but shorter than the final, unburned purple candle. I can’t be the only one who does this, am I?

Advent, from the Latin Adventus, means coming. Advent itself is a time to recognize and celebrate the fact that we are always waiting, waiting for more to come. God created human beings such that we are never content with what “is,” but always desire more. We yearn, long, desire, strive, and yes, we wait for more to come. Ultimately and in its deepest, most fundamental sense, what we long for is to be with God, to join our limited, finite self with the infinite. Since this can only happen after our death, our longings in our day by day lives take on less lofty manifestations. But it is, nonetheless, in those everyday longings that we find our vocational calls, what we desire in our work and our relationships. Advent is a time set aside especially for us to touch these longings, to simply recognize and sit with the reality that life will never complete us, will never fully satiate us.

This, of course, is only half the story. If we are always an Advent people, longing for the coming of God in our hearts and lives, we are also always a Christmas people. God-(is)-with-us, Emmanuel! “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” John 14:23. Though we are incomplete, we know God is already with us. God has made his home in us. When we are Advent-ing (to coin a term), we know that God is with us as we touch our deepest desires. The angst of our incompleteness is lessened with the felt knowledge of God transforming our hearts, our minds and our lives.

To Advent in July, we need only ask ourselves what we really long for, knowing God is with us even in what is incomplete.