The Jesse Tree: Holy – Our deepest longing and greatest fear

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

In his book, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, Ronald Rolheiser writes, “We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.”  

This vision of spirituality as a question of what to do with desire demystifies spirituality. To the degree that spirituality is associated with formal, culturally distant, religious practices, it seems inaccessible to tech savvy, secular, socially connected people.  But we don’t have to look too hard into the contours of contemporary life to see desire, spirituality, on full display.  Desire drives our communication and commerce from Tik Tok videos to political memes, from Etsy shops to food vlogs.  

Part of what makes Rolheiser’s insight so attractive is it’s wonderfully non-judgmental.  Stripping spirituality out of the clutches of a moralizing, judgmental, stigmatizing religious context helps us see just how essential spirituality is to our life and happiness.  But this strength is also a weakness.  Without being oriented to some good greater than itself, desire can quickly deteriorate into madness.  Take, for example, the passionate polarization within our political life.  Desire for political power, unmoored from old-fashioned notions of common good or civil discourse, is undermining the very political institutions themselves.  

Day Eighteen – Holiness: Isaiah 6:1-13

Isaiah’s vision in the temple is an encounter with holiness.  Unlike our modern, Western, vision of holiness as a kind of abstract moral perfection, the sounds and symbols in Isaiah’s vision evoke a more ancient, Hebraic understanding of holiness.  Holiness here has to do with the awe inspiring (and terrifying) distance between creator and creation.  We sense something of this sense of holiness when we admire the ocean in its vastness and beauty, perhaps even swimming in its water, all the while knowing that a single rogue wave could overwhelm and annihilate us.  

Spirituality, what we do with the desire that burns within, needs to be tethered to something greater than itself.  If not, its fire is likely to burn us up, or at least burn us out.  That’s why we need holiness.  In fact, I think many of us crave it.  We want our passion projects to be seen, evaluated, and recognized.  We want to break through the barriers and limitations we’ve inherited and get, perhaps, a little bit closer to the inspiration we sense.  

And yet, holiness also terrifies. 

Isaiah’s vision holds both together.  In it we are invited to acknowledge our failures and faults, but also to experience mercy.  Despite his fear and failures Isaiah is not, “undone,” but is invited into deeper life with God for others.  

In Advent we await our encounter with holiness in the coming of Jesus. 

What does spirituality / holiness evoke for you?