Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
The resolution of Peace | An Advent Reflection
By Fr. Larry Gillick, SJ
Praying is wandering around, ahead, backwards and just sometimes, within. Please, quietly, accompany me down a sandy path to a quite dumpy barn or cattle-stall place. It did not take long to see that there was absolutely no one or anything inside. It was more than empty. Yes. There was decaying stuff lying on the ground and some fallen-down scraps of woody chunks.
What was there was the former, the old, the once useful thing. Empty was there, and I stepped in, because I was wandering. I was experiencing something in the middle of not much of what had been. Actually, I was comfortable in the stillness of its nothing. I have been in such spaces and just listened to what I might want to hear; no, nothingness.
Ah, then, secreted in a corner against the stone wall, rested a broken box-like thing that attracted my wandering. It was splintered pretty well, but other than those toothpicks again, there was nothing, empty, useless. I stilled myself and spirit and again experienced a calm, a non-questioning standing within the emptiness of it all. What can this place become? What good is emptiness, uselessness? Brokenness and, of course, me-ness, too.
I moved across and out of the silly little pondering-place, but the silence went along, within and around. I turned, and the prayer blest it all, which I did not question or dismiss.
I received the gift of sensing that the one and ever-present gift God gives me, and us, is the longing which can never, ever, be taken away. The God of all creation and ever-creating has given us an eternal reaching, grasping, hungering for a fullness. It is a true gift if we can only receive it, stand within it, and yet, face the inclinations, temptations, thirsting for “more, please.”
Advent is the time to enjoy that one gift that resolves into peace. Advent is the prayer-time to smile and even laugh at what we are reaching for to unlong our spirits.
We are invited these days to enter the true poverty of our emptiness, our own empty barns, cattle pens where, in fact, Fullness reduced to Tininess will bless His one gift of longing.
Enjoy your wanderings.
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