my desire & God's patience

a few thoughts gathered from Advent & Christmas

This is a modified and expanded version of a caption I shared on Instagram. If you’re not following me there, you can do so at @alea_peister.

Advent proved intense for me this year. God asked me whether He is, in fact, the One I’ve located as my deepest desire — and my desire was found wanting.

The terms of this conversation with God, this year, focused on my desire for marriage. God sort of jump-scared me into a realization that I have allowed a desire and expectation for romantic intimacy to supplant desire for Him. I have wanted nearness to God, but not as much as I have wanted a quantifiable story with a happy end in sight. Not as much as I have wanted a solution to my solitude, to my suffering, to those moments when I’m alone on the road or at the grocery store or on a Monday night in my apartment and I think to myself “it’d be nice for someone to be here with me” — and an ache, a longing, follows the thought.

But what is that ache, that longing?

St. Thérèse of Lisieux writes, in The Story of a Soul, about her longing to give God her mortifications, loneliness, and suffering as “little flowers” she can scatter around His throne. Reading this book challenged me, deeply. St. Thérèse’s example of faithfulness began to illuminate an opportunity I’ve been at risk of missing: namely, the opportunity to give all this longing, and its attendant sorrow, to God as a gift.

Then the question arrived: “What if you give me your singleness for one month? Make of it an oblation to Me?”

I heard that invitation, and I panicked. I did not want to give God this thing, this precious ache, this longing I’ve clung to and coddled and demanded an answer to for so many years . . . what would He do with it? Would He ask it to die?

But eventually, the panic subsided, and on the other side of it there was, and is, and always will be . . . God. Giving Himself to me. And God, inviting me to see His gift of Self and receive it in the deepest parts of myself. Suggesting that the silence of solitude, wherever I experience it, is not cruelty; is, in fact, the opposite — is an invitation to experience God’s presence with particular intimacy. That solitude, in spite of my present discontent with it, might be a gift I can delight in because it gives me a specific opportunity to know and be known by God.

I don’t know why God doesn’t always give us what we want when we want it. I don’t know why He lets us suffer. I don’t know why He lets us conceive good desires and then doesn’t give them the life in the world they seem to cry out for, and allows us to suffer the way only a good desire deferred can make us suffer.

But I do know He draws near to us in our wounds. I know He makes Himself known in a particular way to our suffering. And I know when we finally give God whatever it is that wounds us, we find Him with us — closer, even, than our own breath.

Which is to say we find the silence of God drawn near. His presence suddenly the answer to all things, and our own speech silenced before it. Earthly desire, if well ordered, is not necessarily killed when we consent to receive the silence of the presence of God, but in the expanse of His silence — in its absolute and encompassing intimacy — everything other than that silence takes on a kind of smallness. The clamorous voices fade.

I like my little protestations, my seeming claims to uniqueness, to suffering, to attention. Left to myself I nurse and coddle them. I get nostalgic. I write sad poems. It is hard to give those things up, especially when they seem to lend depth to my sense of identity. If I give whatever it is to God, I don’t own it anymore. It’s His. He can do what he wants with it — and if a suffering was caused by unmet desire for a specific person, place, or thing, to make a gift of that suffering to God means I must relinquish my imagined claim on that person, place, or thing. The future becomes suddenly the mystery it always was, and I can’t avoid that mystery anymore.

The phrase “God is patient” feels by now so familiar it’s almost meaningless on the ear. But in Advent God met me with His patience, and I felt struck by how much more patient He is with my suffering and sin and disordered longing than I am. Until He shook up and unsettled my assumptions about my own desires, I did not realize for how long I had been sick, bleeding even, at the hand of my disordered longing.

God took so much gentle time — years, in my case — to uncover this reality in my soul, one I wished desperately to run from, and having patiently, tenderly, carefully shown it to me, He entered it Himself and began the work to make it new.

I don’t know what’s next for my longing, but that doesn’t seem to be the right question anymore. My right response and offering is simply to say yes — whatever the cost to what I think I want.

I will always be learning how to long for God most and most deeply in this life. I will always be learning how to know His gift of Self as everything I could ever need. Both will require continual mortification of what I think I know and what I think is best.

I started reading Evelyn Underhill’s The School of Charity last week for school, and she summarizes it well —

“The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost. Till we accept this truth, religion is full of puzzles for us, and its practices often unmeaning . . . . A humble and adoring delight in God is the first duty of the believing soul.”

And then, later, she writes,

“The true splendor and heart-searching beauty of the Divine Charity is not seen in those cosmic energies which dazzle and confound us; but in the transcendent power which stoops to an intimate and cherishing love, the grave and steadfast Divine action, sometimes painful and sometimes gentle, in the small unfinished soul.”

In this, in all this relinquishing, in this “stern choice,” in this reception of the “sometimes painful and sometimes gentle” Divine action, is joy.

God always presents Himself to our hearts to be clung to in trial, but even more so to be delighted in as He gives of Himself to our lives. However He arrived in Christmastide, let us receive Him. Wherever He leads us in Epiphany, let us follow.

Let us adore Him.