“As the deer longs for flowing streams,

            so my soul longs for you, O God.”

            —Psalm 42:1, NRSV

Yes, I know it’s all about God. But give me a minute to long. Or rather…therefore let me long.

Yes, longing. As in “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus…joy of every longing heart.” If you asked me to strip it down to the essentials of what this human thing is all about this side of eternity I’d say it was something like this—we burn, we desire, we hunger, we…long.

Which begs the question: Can you know the joy without a longing heart? Could you ever be a Lover without desiring, and being desired by, the Beloved?

Advent gives us time to savor the delicious tension of the long longing. Even if, most of the time, we’d like to be relieved of it. “Please, if you would, fast forward to the resolution. Save the hard work in darkness for the montage, like Creed preparing for the title fight.  Zip us to the ring, the bell, the roaring crowd. In this case, zip us to Christmas and tell us it all turns out right in the end.”

Which, of course, it does. But only after Christ on the cross has exposed the world and each human heart for what it is: a cauldron of unruly desire.

Fleming Rutledge notes our cultural tendency to cast everyconflict as good versus evil. In her new book, Advent: The Once and Future Foming of Jesus Christ, she shares the struggles of the actor, Viggo Mortensen, who resisted those who would see his Lord of the Rings character, Aragorn, as a model of pure good fighting pure evil. Aragorn and his companions, Mortensen said, were “conscious of good and evil in neighbors, strangers, adversaries, and most important themselves.” (310)

The call is coming from inside the house! The chaos is within! Something Jamie Quatro gets just right in In her scandalous, luminous novel, Fire Sermon. Quatro places these words in the voice of Maggie, her protagonist, as she is agonizing over the implications of an affair:

“I prayed forgiveness, after. Prayed importantly and body would tend always and only toward Thomas [her husband]. Prayed the Psalms: Cleanse me with hyssop, wash this whitewashed tomb, this painted sepulcher, create in me a clean heart, renew a steadfast spirit…Prayed, like Saint Augustine entangled with his outward beauties, for God to pluck me out like a coal from a fire…But Brothers, Sisters: What if that’s the wrong prayer? What if the right prayer is Let me burn, only walk beside me in the flames? Remember the Israelites wandering the Sinai Desert led by a pillarof fire.” (188)

My point being that a blessed Advent might bring us what Quatro calls the gift of learning “to long acutely.” Like those wise attendants awaiting the bridegroom in Matthew 25, a disciplined tending of the flame turns out to be the most important activity in which we can engage.

And we are not alone in this. The whole cosmos, it turns out, is on fire. Deer pant after God. The whole creation groans with labor pains. “And what is wind,” KimberlyJohnson asks in a Holy Saturday poem, “but a dialect of longing?—: the high/pressure rushing to fill the low…No wonder/the wind, when it says anything at all/howls.”

So what befits an Advent more, than a whetted appetite for a discontented God?