“Christmastime is here…”
It’s official. Everyone is getting the shopping bug and the sound of Christmas songs have begun to blare from every store radio. But it’s not the Christmas season. It’s Advent. How have we become such a busy people that we have forgotten this incredibly beautiful time of preparation? I think we can find the answer by looking at the state of our hearts. There is a line in one of my favorite Advent hymns, Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus, that alludes to this. In the song, Christ is called the “joy of every longing heart.” There is such beauty in this. The difficulty comes when we realize that although yes, our hearts are full of longing, it may not be for Him.
We all have desires. We yearn for love, peace, prosperity, health, joy, and many other things. It’s natural for us to have these desires, but how intense are they? Why do we have them? What is the main reason we want anything? Usually, it’s because we are searching for happiness, preferably accompanied by a sense of fulfillment and belonging. The crazy thing is that as we go on our individual quests for happiness, we are seduced into thinking that we will actually find it here, and so our cycle of searching never ends, leaving us world-weary and low on hope.
Yesterday, many of us probably heard the familiar words,
“O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear …”
Once we were all captives to sin and death, but now we are only captives by our choosing. We allow ourselves to be distracted by our desires, our longing for earthly things and for temporal happiness. And when we make material possessions or people more important than relationship with the Lord, that is actually a choice — conscious or unconscious — to remain in captivity. In a sense, we are addicted to our desires. We want what we want, when we want it. But once we get it, we get tired of it or wonder why it doesn’t make us happy, and we move on to the next thing and start all over again, continuing the cycle of addiction.
In one of his books, Fr. Henri Nouwen gives a great example of this type of addiction. He shares a personal story of seeking fulfillment in another person and becoming dependent on this person’s affection and friendship. Fr. Nouwen recognized this “interpersonal addiction as an expression of a need for total surrender to a loving God who would fulfill the deepest desires of my heart.”[1] Even though he thought what he wanted was affection and friendship from this one person, he was actually longing for a type of fulfillment that can only come from the Lord. Fr. Nouwen realized that if he continued grasping after relationship with this person he would be choosing his “addiction” over trusting in God’s love to fulfill all his “deepest desires.” This story shows us very concretely how our choices can either keep us in slavery or lead us to freedom.
If I think of the things I long for — material possessions, relationships with certain people, health and well-being for my family, financial security, even sanctity — if I really examine why I want these things, it always comes down to my “deepest desires”: to be happy and to feel loved and secure right now, and to feel that I’m living my life the way I ought to. I’m sure there are some people who are able to more consistently keep their focus on God and be detached from earthly things, but I think the majority of people struggle with really believing He can (and will) fulfill their innermost longings.
So yes, our hearts are full of longing, but we are tricked into thinking that what we really need are things similar to the list I made above. In reality, if we take an honest look at our reasons for wanting these things, we see that all our desires point to Christ, the “joy of every longing heart.” He is the true “desire of every nation” and Advent is the time to rediscover this, to come face to face with Him, Who personifies all our longings and sets us free from our earthly yearnings. He comes to save us, to raise us up, to restore us to peace. Our burdens, our brokenness, our inconsistency, the messiness that is our lives … Christ is coming to be present with us in it all.
Advent is a time to prepare for the Lord’s coming at Christmas, but also to remember that He comes to us each day to meet us in our now. It is in this daily encounter of His presence that we are prepared for His coming again in glory at the end of time. In this “season of now” we are invited to slow down, to rediscover our awe, to gaze, to rest. By taking pause for the next few weeks to prepare for His Christmas coming, we are giving ourselves a better chance of responding to Christ when He comes every day, and in turn, readying ourselves for his final coming when He will truly be revealed as “the joy of every longing heart.”
Come, Thou long expected Jesus,
born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in Thee.
[1] Life of the Beloved, pg. 80 – 81
