Among all the corporal works of mercy, it would seem, we do the best with this one. At a more obvious level at least, we tend to fulfil our duty here. If someone close to us, a family member, relative, or friend, is more seriously ill, we generally do not find it difficult to spend some time with him or her. Most people who are sick in hospitals receive visitors, sometimes more than their doctors and nurses would like.

When Jesus tells us to visit the sick, however, he means much more than simply visiting family members, relatives, and friends who are hospitalized. What else does he want of us?

Among other things, Jesus’ counsel to visit the sick means that we should examine our attitudes towards those who are sick in view of purging ourselves of a certain arrogance. Not so subtle in our society is the attitude that those who are sick are somehow responsible for their illness – with the other side of that being that we, who are healthy, should get the credit for our health. … “I take care of myself, my attitudes are positive, I live right, and that’s why I’m healthy! It’s no wonder she is sick, given how she thinks and lives!”

That is a very common attitude and there is an incredible arrogance in it. Moreover this arrogance is further reaching than we think. Initially, it makes a harsh judgement on persons who are sick because of depression or various psychosomatic illnesses. It blames them for being sick and, at the same time, congratulates itself for being well. Then it goes further:

It blames all sick persons for their illnesses, pure and simple. When we are healthy, we have the tendency to look at sick persons, indeed even very sick people who are dying from illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, heart disease, and the like, and see them as somehow responsible for that illness. Sometimes this is expressed openly and sometimes it is only there subtly within an attitude, but it is generally there and it is accentuated in a culture that is so strongly focused on being young, physically healthy, trim, and good-looking.

You see this among conservative persons in their attitude towards those who are sick with AIDS. There is the not-so-subtle accusation: “It’s your own fault! If you had a better moral life you wouldn’t be in this situation.” Liberals today are generally sympathetic towards AIDS victims but do not always have that same sympathy for those whose who are sick because they smoke, have bad eating habits, or (worst case scenario) those who are unhealthy because of scruples and moral rigidity. There is present the clear judgement: “This illness is your own fault!”

We if were really honest with ourselves, most of us would have to admit that we make some brutal judgements about various people who are sick. Maybe we blame those who are sick for that illness as a way of trying to immunize ourselves against sickness: “I don’t live that way so I will never get sick the way you are!” Perhaps then there is more fear in this than arrogance, but, in either case, when we feel like that we are not visiting the sick in the biblical sense.

Related to this too is the whole issue of our attitude towards those who are physically challenged or handicapped. Again, there is an incredible arrogance among those who are not as physically challenged as others.

Visiting the sick, as Jesus understood this, means that we must value and treat all lives as equal, irrespective of their overt physical qualities and appearance. We all struggle with this. Despite the fact that today most countries in the West have laws which attempt to enshrine equality, we do not live this out very well, both in attitude and in actual life. Those who are physically handicapped, despite the more politically-correct terms we have coined to describe them, are basically not treated as equals. From the way we treat the unborn to the way we patronize (and distance ourselves from) basically everyone else who is physically different from ourselves, we fail in visiting the poor.

Again, perhaps this takes its root more in fear than in arrogance, but the end result is the same. We self-congratulate and feel good about ourselves at the expense of somehow blaming others for their less than full health.

So Jesus asked: Do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed were worse culprits than all those who didn’t die? (Luke 13, 1-4)

When we think of the essentials of the Christian faith we generally associate these with belief in a certain creed, acceptance of various dogmas, adherence to a certain moral code, especially as it pertains to private morality, involvement with a church community, and with having some personal relationship to Christ in our lives.

Now, while these things are essential and may never be denigrated, Jesus would add something else. For him, a criterion, in fact the criterion, for the practice of the Christian faith is the exercise of the corporal works of mercy. Have we fed the hungry? Given drink to the thirsty? Clothed the naked?

Jesus’ command to practice the corporal works of mercy is direct, uncompromising, and everywhere present in the entire New Testament. Taken as whole, every tenth line in the New Testament is a direct challenge to the Christian to reach out to the physically poor. In Luke’s gospel, it is every sixth line. In the Epistle of James, it is every fifth line. Involvement with the poor is not a negotiable item. This is mandated with the same weight as is any creed, dogma, and moral or spiritual teaching.

And this may never be spiritualized. The command to be involved with the physically poor means just that, the physically poor. It is rationalizing when we turn the corporal works of mercy into something less concrete, namely, when we define the physically poor in such a wide sense so as to include everyone – “To feed the hungry can also mean feeding those who are spiritually hungry.” “To give drink to the thirsty can also mean giving spiritual nourishment to those who, while affluent materially, are hungry for deeper things.” There is a sense in which this is true, but that is not what Jesus intended in Matthew 25 and not what the church has perennially intended in its social teachings. There is a spiritual sense to hunger, thirst, and poverty, but that is addressed elsewhere, both in the New Testament and in church teachings. Reaching out to the deeper, non-material, hungers and thirsts of humanity is what is mandated in the spiritual works of mercy. The words of Jesus in the gospels challenging us to reach out to the physically poor are not intended spiritually. The corporal works of mercy are about reaching out to the physically poor, pure and simple.

So how do we give drink to the thirsty?

Obviously, especially given what has just been said, there is an aspect to this that is brutally concrete. Water is even more important than food. Without water we die, are unable to wash ourselves and our clothing, and are unable to enjoy any quality of life whatever. To lack clean, drinkable water is to lack the first necessity of life. Hence, Jesus’ command to give drink to the thirsty is, first of all, about looking around ourselves and our world and trying to provide for every person on this earth clean, drinkable water.

This, given the present situation of the planet, is not easy to do. A long, and mostly morally sanctioned, history of privilege and inequality – wherein some of us have surplus while others lack for basic necessities – has made for a situation in which there is now a rationalized acceptance of the fact that millions of people lack the basic physical necessities for life, including clean, drinkable water. Thus, to get water to the thirsty today requires more than just the positive efforts being made by those individuals and agencies which are directly trying to bring clean water into poor areas. What is required, as well, is a change of heart and ultimately a change of lifestyle, by each of us who does have clean water.

As the great social encyclicals of the church, from Leo XIII through John Paul II, re-iterate over and over, clean water will come to everyone on the planet when those of us who have surplus, of any kind, live fully moral lives, namely when we accept that is it not right to have surplus while other lack necessities: 

 -God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. … Thus created goods should flow fairly to all. All other rights, whatever they may be, are subordinated to this principle. (Popularum Progressio 22 & Gaudium et Spes 69)

 -No person or country may have surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.” (Rerum Novarum 19; Quadragesima Anno 50-51; Mater et Magistra 119-121; Popularum Progressio 230)

Giving drink to the thirsty involves looking at those principles with more moral courage than we have up to now.

A cynic once quipped: “What would you get if you crossed a radical liberal social justice advocate with a strongly conservative pious daily communicant?” The answer? Dorothy Day!

That’s a piece of wit which it can serve to throw some light on how one might begin, today, to live out the first corporal work of mercy, the command to feed the hungry.

How do we feed the hungry? Even if we are convinced, and perhaps even obsessed, by Jesus command to do this, how, in fact, can it be done today? The world is a big place and millions upon millions of people live in hunger. Moreover we live a situation of compounded complexity of every sort, political, social, and economic. There is no simple way to get resources from the rich to the poor, from your table to the table of someone who is hungry. How can you live out Christ’s command to feed the hungry, given the complexities of today’s world?

Generally speaking, rightly and wrongly, we look to our governments, the United Nations, relief organizations, social services, welfare, and other such agencies to do this for us. Given the scope and complexity of poverty and hunger in the world, the tendency is to look over our shoulders, to something massive, to some big government or agency, to feed the hungry. We tend to feel too small and individually over-powered in the face of hunger’s enormity.

But this can be, and invariably is, a rationalization, an abdication, a way of escaping Jesus’ command. Ultimately we cannot use the excuse that things are too complicated, that we are too small and powerless, and that only huge organizations can do anything for the hungry. The gospel call to feed the hungry is uncompromising and eminently personal. Each of us is called upon personally to do something real and this must be something beyond the normal corporate things we are involved in, paying taxes and giving charity monies to governments and big agencies to enable them to do this for us. We must do something ourselves.

But what more can we do concretely? How can you and how can I feed the hungry?

There are a couple of possible approaches:  Mother Theresa takes one approach. For her, Jesus’ command is simple and clear. Each of us should personally, beyond government and other agencies, reach out concretely and touch some poor person or persons. There should be times when we are, literally, taking food to hungry people, working in soup kitchens, giving aid to individual street people, and having a poor person eat at our table. This approach is individual, personal, and concrete. Each poor person has a face and one does not, at least not all the time, ask questions regarding where this person will eat tomorrow or what social problems are causing this hunger. In this view, the demand that we feed the hungry challenges us precisely to reach out beyond ideologies and social theories and irrespective of social structures, like the Good Samaritan, person-to-person, take food to the hungry.

But there is another approach, more abstract though not less critical. In this view, it is less important to feed this or that individual person on a given day than it is to change the social, political, and economic structures that are responsible for that particular person being hungry. This approach is less personal and slower, but can, at the end of the day, be more far-reaching. In it, one attempts to feed the hungry by involving oneself in social justice groups that are trying to change the conditions that produce poverty.

Both of these approaches, in their best expressions, are predicated on some other things: Feeding the hungry, as Jesus asks us to do it, involves a reduction in our own standard of living. To feed the hungry means to consume less ourselves, to do some fasting, and to live in a simplicity that puts us in more solidarity with the poor. Feeding the hungry also means prayer. We have some bad habits that only God can cure and thus only the outside power of God can ultimately transform our world.

So which is the best approach? As Christians, our task is not to pick between being a Mother Theresa or a social justice advocate. The gospel asks us to be both. We need to work at transforming the conditions that create poverty even as we, like Mother Theresa, reach out personally, beyond the economics and social issues involved, to feed very individual poor people.

Jesus’ command to feed the hungry asks to become a Dorothy Day.

Long before it was fashionable to publish books of lists, my generation was asked to memorize them. As children, many of us were asked to memorize, among other things, a mini-catalogue that was, back then, called a list of the corporal works of mercy. It contained seven biblical imperatives:

                        Feed the hungry

                        Give drink to the thirsty

                        Clothe the naked

                        Shelter the homeless

                        Visit the sick

                        Ransom the captive

                        Bury the dead

My suspicion is that few of us have thought much about this list for a long time and that a new generation of Christians is not even aware that it exists. This is not to say, of course, that present catechesis and spirituality has not, in other ways, picked up and incorporated what is commanded by this list. The strong emphasis on social justice within recent years attempts to bring the same challenge. However, the goodness of this recent development notwithstanding, there can be, I feel, considerable benefit in revisiting that old list. Hence, this column begins a series of reflections, partially geared for the lenten season, on the corporal works of mercy.

Before examining each of these individually it can be helpful to look at the concept of mercy itself. What does it mean to be merciful in the religious sense?

Medieval theology taught that mercy flows spontaneously out of charity, like smoke from fire. Nonetheless, it suggested that it should still be considered a separate virtue and an important one. Moreover, it linked mercy to justice, seeing it as one dimension of justice. This insight is valuable because mercy does flow out of charity and ultimately does take its root in justice. It does too, however, have its own specificity and this can be seen when we examine it biblically.

In the Old Testament, mercy (HESED, often translated as loving-kindness) is a quality ascribed first of all to God – “Give thanks to the Lord for his loving-kindness is without end.”  Later, the prophets begin to challenge the people with it, telling them that what God wants is not sacrifice but mercy, as practised by God. What is implied in this?

Commentators sometimes try to explain mercy by contrasting it to justice (mercy is optional, justice is not) but this can be misleading. The biblical concept of mercy is ultimately rooted in justice, it presupposes justice. Mercy however goes beyond justice the way advanced calculus goes beyond simple arithmetic, it adds something even while it presupposes what it dwarfs. Properly understood, mercy is super-justice.

Biblically, mercy it is a word used to describe the feelings and actions that a very loving parent has towards his or her children. There is justice here, surely, but there is much more. In scripture, the concept of mercy connotes feelings and actions which are deeply personal, one-to-one, unique, special, tender, and warm. The tender love of a parent for a child dwarfs the demand of strict justice even while never violating it.

Classically, in trying to teach this to us, the church complied various lists which tried to summarize what is implied in imitating God’s mercy. The corporal works of mercy are one such list, though there are others. In essence, these lists try to challenge us to be more holy, God-like, through practising a justice which is more personal, one to one, warm, and gracious beyond strict need. The works of mercy ask us to make everyone, especially the poor and needy, our family.

In looking at the list of the corporal works of mercy, we see that each imperative, save the last one, is explicitly commanded in Scripture. The prophets of the Old Testament made this list the acid test for faith. If you did these things you had faith – and vice versa. Jesus goes even further. For him, as is evident in Matthew 25, the corporal works of mercy are the criteria for salvation and the measure of how we are treating him – “Whatsoever you do unto the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, sick, and captive, you do unto me.”

Sometimes it is good to revisit old fox-holes. Old lairs can be full of surprises. The list of the corporal works of mercy, long buried in the thicket, awaits such exploration.   

Nearly fifteen years ago, Swiss analyst, Alice Miller produced a little essay that made a big impact, The Drama of the Gifted Child.

For her, the gifted child is not the kid with the extraordinary intelligence quotient, Einstein’s kid. In Miller’s view rather, the gifted child is the child who is, from the womb onwards, extraordinarily sensitive, the child who, among other things, picks up, internalizes, and lives out the expectations of others. Such a child, early on, becomes a pleaser and often goes through life renouncing his or her own needs so as to try always not to disappoint anyone.

Too often, however, such a child grows into an adult who, already in early mid-life, in her thirties or early forties, ends up complaining: “I’ve lived my whole life for others. I’ve never really made my own choices. First, it was my parents, everything I did as a child was to please them, to not disappoint. Then it was my teachers, my coaches, my church, my peers. Always it was a question of letting go of what I wanted so as to meet others’ expectations. The same thing in my marriage, my needs always got sacrificed so as not to disappoint my spouse. I’ve never been able to do things just for me. I’ve spent my life victimized by others’ expectations. And, through this all, I have become a timid person, good and virtuous, though not by choice but by conscription and weakness. I’m in mid-life and I’m like a child, not virtuous really, just lacking in nerve to ever do what I really would want.”

Whether these words are spoken on a therapeutic couch or at a friend’s coffee table, they get uttered a lot. This is a common lament, the complaint of a good person who, after years of giving, starts to feel victimized and begins to let bitterness seep into her or his life.

But am I a victim when I feel like that? Is the gifted child a victim or is she virtuous?

There are two ways of looking at this: On the one hand, if I make such a lament, I am confessing lack of nerve, lack of strength, a weakness – “I’m too weak in the face of the expectations of others to live out my own internal integrity.” On the other hand, I am confessing too to a certain selflessness: “I have been living unselfishly all these years.” Not a bad thing, viewed this way.

But is it selflessness or weakness? Can it be both? Where does the gifted child end and the sacrificing Christ begin? What is the distinction between victim and virtue?

That distinction is not so easily drawn. When is one a victim and when is one giving one’s life for others?   At the level of outward appearance, simple phenomenology, this can be indistinguishable. Outward action is not the criterion, inward freedom is. I am victim when somebody takes my life and I am practicing selfless virtue when I freely give it.

Jesus illustrates this. As he sacrifices freely his life, renouncing consistently his own needs in the face of the needs of others, he keeps repeating, as if a mantra: “Nobody takes my life from me. I give it freely.”

Jesus was not a victim, he made that plain in the Garden of Gethsemane and again before Pilate. He chose to lay down his life. It was a free decision, made in love. Nobody can take by force what one gives for free.

It is from this, Jesus’ example of a love that freely sacrifices unto to death,  that we must learn. The key to move beyond being and feeling the victim lies in this since all of us, like the gifted child, constantly find ourselves unfree in the face of others’ demands. Nobody escapes the unfairness of life and nobody, other than a complete monster, goes through life without ever putting other people’s needs ahead of his or her own. There are many places where life must be freely laid down or it will be forcibly taken. It I never freely give away my life, I will forever be victimized because, daily, someone will be taking it.

Hence my choice, at least in terms of choosing adulthood and morality, is not between being the gifted child who lives for others or living life for myself. My choice is rather between being the gifted child or the giving adult. The gifted child gives, not freely, but because he or she is too weak to resist the request. The action is unselfish, but the result is bitterness. The giving adult gives freely, not out of weakness, but out of strength. That action too is unselfish and the result is participation in the joy of Christ.

The challenge of the gospel is in the end the challenge of simple human growth, namely, to move from bitter victim to joyful giver, from gifted child to giving adult.

Hopefully at our burial, none of us will request that they play Frank Sinatra singing: I DID IT MAY WAY. Anyone who actually lives out that philosophy and forever insists on his or her own way will probably not have a very large contingent of family, friends, and community standing at his or her grave full of gratitude. Our family and friends will receive our lives in gratitude precisely when we do not always “do it my way”.

• Make the new year a creative one: Write a poem every morning. How can you do that? Poet, William Stafford, has the answer: “Lower your standards!” 
• Know this: A society which scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. So writes John Gardner.
• Are you planning to spend your summer vacation writing an academic article? Consider this: It is estimated that there are about 200,000 academic journals published in the English language and the average number of readers per article is five.
• A post-modern, biblical, recasting of Murphy’s Law: In the house of irritation there are many rooms! Remember, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for an irritated person not to be a pain to be around.
• Since 1993, close to 200 lawsuits have been filed by USA prison inmates, defending on grounds of religion practices that range from masturbation to reggae music. In one case, in a Texan prison, an inmate claimed that his religion required that once a week he be served chateaubriand. Why isn’t religion more popular?
• If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf. (Bob Hope 
• Past cultures believed in the other world, a reality beyond their own. We too believe in the other world, Hollywood.
• Careerist’s credo for those in ecclesial or civil service:

            Don’t think.

            If you think, don’t speak.

            If you think and speak, don’t write.

            If you think and speak and write, don’t sign your name.

            If you think and speak and write your name, don’t be surprised.

                                                                        (National Catholic Reporter)

• Yes, moral relativism is all the fashion: A lot of people say that there aren’t any “shoulds” in life, but here’s something you should know: There are only three words in the English language that end with gry … hungry, angry, and puggry! 
• Having trouble defining God? Try Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of the ineffable: God is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification.  The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character. His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categorical conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality. 
• Strange anomalies. Therapy and prostitution: If you are lonely and nobody understands you and you feel like going crazy and you have some money left over that you don’t need for food, you can buy somebody to love you, at $100 per hour. But there are two different kinds of love you can buy; one is laudable, the other criminal, and the difference between them is laughable. Yet how exactly to explain that difference? Here’s a PH.D thesis in phenomenology waiting to be written.
• Then there is the story of the Farmer who voted against Daylight Saving Time because he was afraid that the extra hour of sunlight each day might be too much for his crops to take!
• It is easier to behave yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of behaving.

So have a good year!

“Are you happy?”  How would you honestly answer that? My suspicion is that, for most of us, this would be a painful question which, given our fantasy of what happiness should be, we would tend to answer in the negative: “No, I don’t think I’m happy. I would like to be, but there are too many limitations and frustrations in my life which block happiness.”

“Are you happy?”  To stare that question square in the face can make you more unhappy. A torturous self-scrutiny can result from it. What this suggests is that perhaps it is not a good question to ask in the first place. To ask myself: “Am I happy?” is to confuse things and to begin to demand things from life and from God that are not realistic.

For a Christian, there is a better question. The essential question should not be, “Am I happy”? but rather, “Is my life meaningful?” That is a different question, one which can help purify our perspective on things.

What God has promised us in Christ is not, as is unfortunately so often preached and believed, a life free from pain, sickness, loneliness, oppression, and death. The preacher who tells you that you will have less pain in life if you take Jesus seriously is not in touch with the gospel. What the incarnation promises is not that Christ will do away with our pain, but that God will be with us in that pain. That is something quite different. In fact, one can go further and say the opposite: If you take the gospel seriously, you will probably have more pain in your life because you will be a more sensitive person.

To take the gospel seriously is not to be given immunity from the human condition. No. For the Christian, as for everyone else, there will be the same sicknesses, the same cold lonely seasons, the same painful frustrations, the same choices that are regretted, and the same bitter losses. Like everyone else, too, eventually we will have to face death. Faith in God does not, in this world, save one from pain, misunderstanding, loneliness, and death. Faith does not offer a life free of pain. What God does promise is to be with us in that pain. That is why our Saviour’s name is Emmanuel, a name which means God-is-with-us.

To have faith in God is to have God with you. This, as Avery Dulles once so aptly put it, does not give you a ladder to crawl out of the human condition, but a drill to burrow into the heart of it: “Jesus enables us to believe that human life, with all its contradictions, is the place where God is preeminently found. Unlike every other mythology, the myth of the Incarnation gives us strength to face up to the harsh realities of our fragmented world, to feel and to transmit the touch of God’s reconciling love. The Incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape from the ambiguities of this life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of the planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.”

For the Christian, then, the important question is not: “Am I happy?” but “Is my life meaningful?” By asking the latter question rather than the former one, I do not torture myself with some unattainable romantic ideal and, more importantly, I do not ask God to exempt me from the human condition. My life is meaningful precisely when I sense God’s presence in the midst of my suffering, sicknesses, loneliness, and pain. My faith should never pressure me to ask God to exempt me from these. Why should I be spared the human condition? Rather my faith should allow me to stand inside of every reality in my life, positive and negative, and see some meaning in it.

“Is my life meaningful?” When I ask the question this way the perspective is very different. Now my happiness will no longer depend upon my never getting sick, or upon my not getting lonely, or upon my never being misunderstood, or upon my never making wrong choices, or on somehow being exempt from death’s shadow. Life can be frustrating and still be very meaningful. We can be lonely, sick, sorrowful about wrong choices, over-worked and unappreciated, staring old age and death in the face and still experience deep meaning. Happiness will be a by-product of that.

Are my symbols working? Is my faith deep enough so that every corner of my experience, no matter how painful, makes some sense in a higher plan? Is God with me as I walk through both health and sickness, joy and sorrow, friendship and loneliness, success and failure, youth and aging? Does my life have a meaning? The question about happiness comes after that question.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

So writes Toni Morrison at the end of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. So too, in some way, has written every poet of the heart.  There is a loneliness that roams, that can make us strange to ourselves, that haunts the soul. 

All of us experience it. We ache at our center. There, where we would wish a stillness, we find a longing, a loneliness, a relentless ache for consummation that does not go away even when we do not sleep alone. This kind of loneliness can not be soothed by a rocking chair. No. It drives us outward, to far-off places.

And we wander to those places, the sound of our own feet strange to ourselves, forever wanting some affection, some attention, some love, some achievement that eludes. Yes, the very beat of the heart brings a pain: to be one with that someone special, to leave a mark, to celebrate and to not have darkness, to dance and to not have shame, to play and to have delight, to display so as to be seen for all we are. We have an ache in the heart, to fly, beyond our skin.

What’s to be done? What’s to be gleaned from our wandering? Has loneliness a design? Is there a secret to be learned? 

What we learn from the longing is that we are more, more than any moment in our lives, more than any situation, more than any humiliation, more than any achievement, more than how we find ourselves right now. Longing takes us beyond. What we know through possession is small when compared to what we know through longing. Possession is limited; longing is infinite. Possession puts fences around us; longing takes them down. Only in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable do we know that we are more, more than the limits of our bodies, marriages, jobs, and particular places where we live and die. Longing is the great teacher.

It teaches us – better yet, it lets us touch through desire – God’s deep design for each of us. In our longing, as the mystics have always told us, we intuit the Kingdom of God. In our yearning we see the deeper blueprint for things. 

The Kingdom of God is not, as we know, a question of earthily pleasure (“eating and drinking”) but, as Romans puts it, a matter of justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. 

And justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit are precisely what we ache for in our longing. In the end, our longings are about consummation, oneness, completeness, peace, harmony, and justice. Granted, some particular fantasies, which concretize our longing, may not, on the surface, seem much centred on God’s Kingdom. Fantasies of sex, revenge, fame, and power hardly suggest that the Kingdom of God is being intuited. And yet, even in them, be they ever so crass, there is present always something deeper, a hunger for justice, for peace, for joy, and for oneness in Christ’s body, as well as the knowledge that we are more than what we are limited to at present. In our longing, constantly, we are driven to know that we are more than what we are at this given moment. In our longing we intuit the Kingdom of God.

Advent is about longing: It is about getting in touch with it, about letting it teach us that we are more than the limits of our present, about intuiting God’s Kingdom through it, about coming to a new hope through it, and about getting pregnant through its seed. That is what Mary did and the end result was Christmas.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once suggested that peace and unity will come to our world when there is a high enough psychic temperature to create such a fusion. Behind that metaphor lies an understanding of the lesson of advent, namely, that longing is not something to be denied, repressed, or denigrated, but something rather to be entered into, deepened, and evangelized. In longing are the deep seeds of hope. When we long, the Holy Spirit prays through us. 

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. There is also another kind that roams and this kind drives us into advent.