How Advent Helps Us to See Our Unfulfilled Longings as Invitations to Find God

Advent comes from the Latin word adventus meaning “arrival.”

It is a season when we learn to wait for God’s arrival. To use a metaphor, it is the season of darkness just before the dawn, and we are those who wait eagerly in the darkness for the light to come.

Writes St Augustine:

Historically, Advent has been about remembering the season of preparation leading up to the historic arrival of Jesus in his birth and also about the season we are in as a church, waiting for the future arrival of Jesus in the Second Coming when every wrong thing will be made right.

Writes Professor Robert E. Webber:

I realize that what Advent is asking us to do is particularly difficult for many of us: in Advent, God asks us to wait. 

Now, I love decorating for Christmas as soon as Thanksgiving is over. I love having the tree up (we just put it up on Sunday night!), baking cookies, and listening to Christmas music. However, as each year passes, I approach all the festivity that marks this time of year in Western culture with increasing trepidity, as I now understand the Advent season is primarily about waiting for the festivities to begin on Christmas Day. The church calendar marks the end of Advent on Christmas Eve when 12 feast days of high rejoicing and celebration begin — what many of us know as the 12 days of Christmas.

Every year, as I celebrate Christmas technically a month early according to the church calendar, I am confronted again with my own inability to wait. I am confronted with how I have been shaped by and conformed to the hyper-consumerism around me. I notice how I am frustrated when an item I need on Amazon is not eligible for Prime’s two-day shipping, I no longer shop at the grocery store because I can save time and schedule a free pick up, and my anxiety spikes every time my wifi connection flickers.

Dr Webber’s consistent argument in his book Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year is that living according to the rhythms of the church is an invitation to be shaped and formed according to the story of Jesus, rather than whatever dominant story and culture we might find ourselves in.

At one point in my life, the days after Thanksgiving were days to celebrate and to be shaped by the consumerism around me — i.e. to find those good Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Now, I find myself in an awkward middle where I no longer participate in the post-Thanksgiving consumerism, and yet I am still decorating for Christmas, secretly asking questions like: “In what areas of my life am I rushing for a breakthrough instead of patiently waiting for God’s timing? Where am I resisting the deep formation that comes through waiting?”

The Bible and the history of the church are replete with a deep spirituality of waiting. Advent is a season to lean into all of the fruit that is forged in us through waiting: cleansing, preparation, trust, and prudence.

Ultimately, Advent waiting is about letting the divine delays of God break the power of anything that I am putting my trust in other than God himself. Waiting reveals what I am putting my hope and trust in other than God, and, ultimately, if I pay attention to my heart in a season of waiting, what I love more than God.

As I look through church history, one author is particularly helpful for putting language to the purifying power of waiting: St John of the Cross.

Perhaps most famous for his theology around what has come to be known as the Dark Night of the Soul, I find myself strangely drawn to his idea of “night” when I think about Advent as the time of darkness just before the light breaks through.

Many have incorrectly understood the “Dark Night of the Soul” to be a shorthand phrase for a really hard time in a believer’s life. While it may be true that a really hard time in a believer’s life is a “Dark Night,” even in the sense of which St John speaks, his writing on this concept is so much fuller and richer, and I would even argue helpful to form us into being people who know how to wait for God’s arrival. St John of the Cross’s theology is an advent theology.

If I could be so bold as to summarize what St John means when he writes about a “Dark Night,” it would be this: a Dark Night is anything God does or uses to purify our love for him. It is a season where God is deeply at work (even if we can’t see him or feel him) to lessen our dependence on, trust in, and love for other things (even a sense of his presence) so that we might have the gift of greater dependence on, trust in, and love for God himself. In fact, the words that St John uses to describe the Dark Night in his famous poem are mostly positive: he calls it a “grace,” he calls it “glad,” and he celebrates its guidance in his life unto the supreme goal — that he is “united” with and transformed in love for God.

I don’t know about you, but I am more apt to think about ways to get out of waiting rather than to embrace waiting as a gift that is purifying my love for God.

Yet, in this understanding, a Dark Night is ultimately what we learn to lean into during Advent. We learn to name: Where are the areas in our lives where we are unfulfilled? Where are the areas of life where we are waiting for breakthrough and perhaps struggling in the “in-between”? Where are we waiting for God’s arrival, but perhaps tempted to rush and step out of God’s timing?

St John of the Cross teaches us to see these areas not as burdens or obstacles to overcome, but instead as “graces” or gifts that help us point to God. In other words, they are invitations to prayer.

So, this morning, I’d love to invite us to a counter-cultural posture of Advent. Instead of focusing on decorations, cookies, hot chocolate, Christmas lights, and everything else (for just a moment), I’d love to invite us to get in touch with an unfulfilled longing in our lives. And, I’d love to invite us to direct those longings Godward, holding them in the mystery that we call prayer.

So, if you’re able, maybe take a few deep breaths. Perhaps, as you breathe in pray, “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”

In the quietness of this moment, I’d love to invite you to name with God: What is an unfulfilled longing in your life?

As you breathe in and out, simply name the longing and hold it. If you feel ready, I’d love to invite you to pray this prayer along with Psalm 42:1-3, which we will take a closer look at in the weeks to come:

“Lord, would you help me receive this unfulfilled longing as a grace that is drawing me to prayer?”

P.S. Thank you so much for praying with me in this Advent devotional series on longing, waiting, and prayer! If you have a friend or colleague that you think would benefit from these devotionals in which we are seeking to come alive and live in love with Jesus through this blend of contemplative and charismatic spiritualities, please feel free to share my subscribe link with them: ryanpmurphy.beehiiv.com.

P.S.S. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into Psalm 42 as I think it can help us name some of the core longings of the human heart that we are invited to direct towards God in this Advent season.