A yearning spirit

By Mia Pohlman

A few weeks ago, I felt my spirit was yearning and aching, and I found myself being afraid of that.

A yearning spirit felt like a threat to my contentment, a threat to my ability to ignore my own poverty (and therefore others') and a threat to my ability to do things on my own and be OK. I wasn't sure why I was feeling this.

While reflecting on Advent, though, I was reminded this is the time of waiting and of yearning.

In these weeks leading up to our celebration of the birth of our savior, we are reminded of what it feels like to ache for something that is not yet complete, to yearn and lean into that longing for what we know is right and true and good. It is our time to be drawn deeper into the depths of our God.

Sometimes I wonder if I use the things of life as anesthetics.

Am I allowing everything I do to dull my senses, or instead to lead me deeply, fully into God? Do I let my dailiness, my circumstances, block God out, distract me, or do I let God come alive in them and become real to me? Become real to me.

Audrey Assad wrote it: "I am still drawn to you."

Sometimes, yes, it is good and beautiful to experience the gift of contentment.

"I was/looking for that shop/where the shopkeeper would say,/'There is nothing of value in here,'" Daniel Ladinsky translates the poet Kabir's work. "I found it and did/not leave./The richness of not wanting/wrote these/poems."

I love to imagine what it feels like to be completely empty of desire, to be perfectly content in God -- what heaven must be like. I think, too, though, that we also should consider a yearning spirit a gift when we are given it and see it as an opportunity to press more deeply into the one our souls are patterned after.

Ladinsky also translates one of St. Teresa of Avila's poems: "What is my experience of God's will?/... I sleep where I will/wake with the/strength to/deeply/love/all my mind can hold." This is what I want: to allow everything my mind can hold, everything my eye can take in, to be touched by the deep love of the one who loves all of us this deeply. To be a conduit whose strength is used in loving deeply.

This is the time to remember the deep yearnings of our hearts, to remember we are not yet complete and that our stories are not yet complete.

This is the time to remember that we are moving toward the only one who completes and fulfills all, everything.