Expectant Waiting

We have crossed the threshold of yet another advent – an expectant waiting – for the coming of our God. At every Advent we are reminded in a deeper way perhaps, than at any other time, of our hunger for God. It is a spiritual yearning, a divine dreaming, for ultimately, searching for God is a journey of the mind, the heart, and the soul. What we seek on this journey is not an answer to a question but a personal encounter with mystery that does by definition exceed the farthest limits of imagination. It is a lifelong emptiness that can only be filled with the reality of God’s presence and the totality of God’s being. We need to have dreams as big as God’s love can offer which is ultimately an invitation to share in a divinity beyond our comprehension. Only the uncluttered emptiness of a soul searching for God, the vulnerability of outstretched hands, the joyful root and measure of the longing, leaves room for this God who wants to give gifts to vessels empty enough to receive them. “I am,” says God, “where you are. No place, no person, no time of your life is a stranger to me. You need only to be open and receptive for – therein lies the fulfillment of the promise.”
 
Not to see the world as God sees it, not to love our fellow human beings as God loves, is to miss the face of this God for whom we long. We are created to walk in mystery in a world that is neither heaven nor earth but a world so desperately in need - that our hunger and that need are embraced in the mystery itself. We have the blessed assurance that God is not just the object of our journey but our companion along the way, our guide through lands of the soul where we have never been. We are not alone – this God for whom we long walks with us. Our goal is simply to become a dwelling place whose emptiness, whose hunger and thirst, leaves room for the abiding presence of God.
 
Always it seems that we shall be able to touch the face of God just one step beyond where we are - but each step whether it is our first or our fiftieth demands that we take yet another; there is always more in the invitation to go deeper. In the end, the successful journey no matter how long or how arduous belongs to the passionate heart, to the heart that burns within, to the heart that yearns for the beyond, the yet to be, to those who have the heart to endure and finish what they, with God, have started. God is always adventing, always coming, always entering to refresh and enhance. Our human hunger for God is mirrored by God’s hunger for union with us; a hunger that extends not just to a few spiritually enriched souls but to all of us, not just to the best of us but also to the least of us. God is always giving hope, sustaining hope, building on hope and no one has greater claim on the gifts than each and every one of us. This creative life of God, the source of hope, the fulfillment of our longing and our yearning, is not there just for the asking. It is freely given and is ours just for accepting. God who fashioned the dream is the gaurantor of our hope.
 
Guest post written by Sr. Anne Daniel Young OP, a Dominican Sister of Blauvelt and a member of the Blauvelt Leadership Team.