Ronald Rolheiser
December 8, 2025
Reproduced with Permission
ronrolheiser.com
Advent should never be confused with Lent. Lent is a penitential season. Its color is purple and its symbol is ashes. Unlike Lent, Advent is not about fasting and penance. It's about waiting. Advent is a time to get in touch with longing, with desire, with what it means to wait. Its color is crimson, the color of desire.
With that in mind, here are some images for Advent.
- Every tear brings the Messiah closer! That's an axiom drawn from Jewish apocalyptic literature which highlights that the Messiah can only be born into our lives when we have created the proper space within which to receive him. And that space is created through longing, through waiting, through aching, through tears, through letting frustration and tension stretch our hearts and our vision enough that the Messiah can come, not as superman who is the hero in a Hollywood movie, but as a helpless Christ Child who manifests what love actually is by the way he lives, suffers, dies, and forgives.
- For something to be sublime, there first must be some sublimation! The word sublime takes its roots in the word sublimation. For something to be sublime there first must have been some tension. And the greater the tension, the more sublime it will be if that tension is carried to its proper end and is not resolved prematurely. Gestation cannot be rushed, healing demands its proper season, soulful consummation is predicated on prior waiting, and even wine demands a sufficient time to mature.
- In our longing and loneliness, we intuit the Kingdom of God! We are all familiar with St. Augustine's dictum: You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You. What can we do when we feel lonely, as unanimity-minus-one, when the pain of our aloneness is most acute? We can use that moment, that painful sense of our distance from intimacy, to intuit the Kingdom of God, that is, to let that pain stretch our hearts enough to give us a truer sense of what really constitutes the Kingdom of God.
- Our longing and aching can help raise our psychic temperature! This is an image drawn from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard, a scientist and a mystic, draws a spiritual lesson from the chemistry lab.Sometimes a scientist will put two chemicals together in a test tube, but they won't unite. Instead, they simply lie beside each other, unable to fuse into one. Now if the scientist applies heat to the test tube, they often, at a higher temperature, will fuse and become one. Teilhard applies this to human relationships. Sometimes, for all kinds of reasons, we refuse meaningful relationships with each other and like two chemicals in a test tube remain separate, too cold to unite. However deep longing, aching, hurt, loss, and bitter waiting can, in Teilhard's words, raise our "psychic temperature" to a point where it melts our coldness and opens us to union. Advent is a season to raise our psychic temperature, through letting our longing, loneliness, and frustrations make us less cold, judgmental, and selfish.
- A damp log must first sizzle in a fire before it can burst into flame! This is an image from John of the Cross. When you throw a damp log into a fire it does not catch flame immediately. It must first lie in the fire and sizzle until the heat dries it out sufficiently. Only then will it burst into flame. John suggests that in our longing and our frustrated desires we are metaphorically "sizzling" inside the fire of love (human and divine). In a manner of speaking, the pain is "drying us out", so that at a point we too can burst into flame in love. Advent is a time to let our unfilled longings and our bitter frustrations "sizzle" within us, so as that the flame of love might eventually catch fire within us.
In the end, these images say the same thing. Advent is about proper waiting, about not resolving tension prematurely, about patiently carrying it to let divinity, intimacy, the Messiah, and the sublime, be born more deeply into our lives. Perhaps the one word that summarizes all this is the word patience. Advent is the season to practice patience.
Carlo Carretto was a monk who for a long stretch of his life lived in the Sahara Desert as a desert hermit, where he wrote a series of deeply challenging books. After he had been in the desert for a number of years, a journalist interviewed him and asked him this question: After all these years of silence and prayer, if you had to send one message back to the world, what would it be? What do you hear God saying to the world?
Carretto's answer: God is telling us to learn to wait! To wait for many things! To wait for God!
That's the challenge of Advent.
Top