Advent is a time of preparation, and the preparation should be joyful–except maybe for the shopping. All the people in the TV commercials look so happy to be out buying presents, but I don’t think that magical mall really exists. If it does, please send me the address.
The joyful preparation for Christmas is found in decorating the house, setting up the tree, sending out the invitations, consulting the family recipes, and dozens of other little domestic ceremonies that we learn to love over the years. All that is well and good. But let’s remember that Advent is also one of the Church’s two principal penitential seasons. We observe Lenten fasts and ascetical practices in preparation for Easter. We are also called to keep Advent disciplines in preparation for Christmas. The penitential character of Advent goes back to the early days of the Church, and the Mass readings reflect this history.
The importance of repentance is easily eclipsed in Advent. The feast is coming, but the fast also has a place. They are both meant to be part of a healthy spiritual life, even if they seem like opposites. It’s just one of the many Catholic “both-and” realities, not one over the other, but both in harmony, even when they seem contradictory.
St. John of the Cross can help us understand this strange juxtaposition between longing and fulfillment. The theme of longing runs throughout the saint’s poem and commentary that share the title, The Spiritual Canticle. In it, we follow the story of the Bride’s search for her beloved Bridegroom. When the poem begins, she is alone:
Where have you hidden yourself,
O my Beloved, …
I went out calling you, but you were gone.
She is aching from his absence, wounded by the intensity of her longing. Restlessly, she goes out to find him, no matter what. Along the way, she encounters people and animals of various sorts, but none of them turns her from her quest for her beloved. She endures this lonely searching through many stanzas of the poem.
St. John explains in his commentary what we are meant to draw from these verses. We learn that spiritual maturity requires that we not let created things distract us from the path that leads to true holiness. This ascetical imperative is a well-known theme in his spirituality, and it is perhaps the element that most frequently frightens people away from him. But there is a prior imperative for anyone who wants to follow St. John of the Cross: waking up the heart to long for God.
We need to adopt disciplines and free ourselves from attachment to created things, but not merely to become steely-eyed ascetics. We must turn our desire towards the one truly worthy object of all desire: our beloved Lord, the One who gave all to win our hearts. We must long for Him most of all.
This gives us a key to every penance we undertake, and in fact to the whole of our existence here in this earthly life. We must not direct our desires to ultimate fulfillment in any created thing. This is the choice of Adam and Eve, to turn from God to the thing He created.
This longing should be more than a sweet and nostalgic feeling about God. Much of the Bride’s story in The Spiritual Canticle is an account of the acute pain she carries. This is probably why we fall so easily into earthly comforts: we are unwilling to endure this kind of longing. Again, the Bride shows us how to long well. She goes out in search of the Bridegroom. She is not deterred by the people she encounters, not afraid of wild animals, not satisfied with meadows or flowers or restful forest groves. She continues to search for the one true One, because she is willing to remain in her loneliness and unfulfilled desire. It hurts, but she will not seek comfort in distractions.
How unlike her we are! We live in the Age of Anodynes. The remedy is to recognize the great spiritual benefit of unfulfilled longing. While we are stirred up by this longing, we are more attentive to the working of grace. St. John of the Cross tells us that we do not truly know what it is we need, but Jesus knows. The soul properly disposed “does no more than represent its misery and pain to the Beloved … so that the beloved one may do what to him seems good.… The soul is more secured against self-love and self-seeking by indicating its necessity, instead of asking for that which it thinks is needed.” The Spiritual Canticle II.8.
The point is not simply to suppress our desire for things, as though desire was a weed in the garden. This is not at all what Catholic asceticism is about, in Advent or Lent or at any other time. God created all pleasures, and they are good, because He created them. The desire for pleasure, at its heart, is human and wholesome. The problem isn’t that pleasure is bad, but that we want it for selfish reasons. We become attached to the gratifications that are offered to us, and St. John of the Cross has a lot to say about the danger, not of desires, but of attachments. The disciplines he encourages are not meant to destroy desire but to teach us what desire is for.
In our overstimulated culture, we must struggle to avoid settling for meager comforts and cheap thrills, because our hearts are made for great things. To embrace this truth is hard, but profoundly liberating.
So let’s decorate our houses during Advent, in joyful anticipation of the coming feast. But let’s leave our hearts, for now, a little empty and bare, remembering what we lack, and not afraid to give a voice to our longing: Where have you hidden yourself, O my Beloved?
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