Created to Long

If you visited the site I mentioned in the previous post, you might have visited the page for today. Oh, how there is always something we crave in our hearts (minds, stomachs, etc!) and how often it is not God. As much as I desire unconditional human love and acceptance, good coffee (with half and half), a fulfilling job, and a warm soft bed, no thing on this Earth will ever make me stop wanting. It's a built-in innate need to need God, and so often I try to circumvent it by filling that space with junk. This time of year is especially difficult, because Heaven knows I need that ________. I deserve it, I should treat myself this time. If I've seen or heard that once this year, it's been 1000 times. God knew we need saving, so He came Himself to do the job. Why He cares so much, I'll never fully understand.

Come!

Daily Reading for December 11

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. Every year we roll up all our needs and yearnings and faithful expectation into one word: “Come!”

And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, you have already come and pitched your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite you to anything more than this with our “Come”? Could you approach any nearer to us than you did when you became the “Son of Man,” when you adopted our ordinary little ways so thoroughly that it’s almost hard for us to distinguish you from the rest of our fellow men?

In spite of all this we still pray: “Come.” Is it true, then, that we only “celebrate” this season, or is it still really Advent? Are you the eternal Advent? Are you he who is always still to come, but never arrives in such a way as to fulfill our expectations? Are you the infinitely distant One, who can never be reached?

You promised that you would come, and actually made good your promise. But how, O Lord, how did you come? You did it by taking a human life as your own. You became like us in everything: born of a woman, you suffered under Pontius Pilate, were crucified, died, and were buried. And thus you took up again the very thing we wanted to discard. You began what we thought would end with your coming: our poor human kind of life, which is sheer frailty, finiteness, and death.

From “The God Who Is to Come” by Karl Rahner, in Encounters with Silence, translated by James M. Demske (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).