For Longing
Following a night of Lenten activities with our respective congregations, Paul and I drove up to Seattle to celebrate my mom’s birthday.
It’s not a traditional milestone unless you count the Lunar New Year cycle (at 72, we’re back to the year of the horse!) but every benchmark on the long wilderness road of dementia feels poignant. It is a strange and holy thing to celebrate the gift of ongoing life, having acknowledged the limitations of that gift through a POLST form. It is extremely Lent is what it is.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in Lent the marvel and confines of our humanity are laid bare. Through barren wilderness we are brought into abundance; in confession we are surrounded by grace. What a wonder!
Just as with the very many whose families or communities are touched by dementia or another decidedly wilderness affliction, the diagnosis comes with a deep longing. Longing for more time of health, or less time of decline. Longing for an alternative past or the choice of a different future. Longing for a map through the grief and the insurance. Longing for cure, or mobility, or relief, or release.
Even for those who don’t experience those particular longings, we long nonetheless! What do you find yourself longing for this season? For rest, or peace, or relationship, or grace, or joy, or time, or the presence of God, or just something different?
These longings are so appropriately nestled within season of spiritual reflection on life, death, and resurrection.
Father Ron Rolheiser says that we are born with a longing that never fully goes away; a desire that is decidedly human. He quotes Augustine in saying “…our hearts are restless until they rest in (God).”
I have done enough grief work to know that my longing will not subside when my mom is no longer gripped by dementia (though it will take different shape). So too that longing that we are born with – perhaps for a holy fulfillment outside of ourselves, or a sacred sureness that brings the world around us to a sensical wholeness – does not go away after one Lenten season has come and gone (though its edges may soften).
A life of faith is not meant to take away our longings, but come alongside them like a gentle friend. As a community of faith, we hold our longings together as we await the fullness of time when our longing of longings will be ultimately comforted as we rest in God’s good kindom, when none will weep or thirst or ache any more. Until then, our souls find ease in knowing that God longs for us too:
blessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.
may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
may the forms of your belonging – in love, creativity, and friendship –
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.
may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.
may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.
may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
(For Longing, by John O’Donohue)
In longing,
Pastor Karyn
