On Being Awake To Your Hunger

An Advent reflection

On Sunday near the end of the service, I watched a small ceremony take place at the altar. I’ve been at the same church for 17 years, and if I’ve ever seen this particular ceremony take place on the last Sunday of Advent, I don’t remember it. There was no grand announcement of the event, but with quietness and reverence, the blue Advent banners flanking the altar were quietly and reverently removed, and replaced with the white Christmas banners. The ceremonious exchange caught my attention because as I watched, a large lump lodged itself in my throat and tear gathered at corners of my eyes.

Buechner said that we ought to pay attention to our tears, and so I do. I don’t think we weep for no reason at all. Just because we sometimes struggle to name the source, doesn’t mean there isn’t one…

In recent months, I’ve made a practice of asking myself what it is I am really hungry for. I don’t mean purely physical hunger, though that is part of it, but I use the word “hunger” in its metaphorical sense. When I want to shop, or when I want to numb myself with distraction, when I want to make art, or read a specific book, or listen to (or avoid listening to) a specific podcast, etc, I am trying to pay attention to what is beneath the surface of my longings and my avoidance. I think of this work as an extension of Buechner’s wisdom about paying attention to our tears.

I think of this as a response to Jesus’ admonishment for us to “stay awake”.

Sleeping, numbing and distraction are all easier than being fully present to God, to ourselves, and to others, and I am sharply aware of my tendencies towards one or all of these ways of disengaging.

But Advent reveals a gnawing hunger for something spiritually substantial—it awakens us to a longing for something that can satisfy a hunger that can feel too elusive to name. It turns our chins towards a Story that we can’t escape—no matter how much tinsel, shopping, and distraction we bury it under.

In Brennan Manning’s essay, “Shipwrecked At The Stable”¹ he says that Christian piety has “prettified” the story of Jesus birth and in our sentimentality of it all, we “rob Christmas of its shock value.”

“Pious imagination and nostalgic music rob Christmas of its shock value, while some scholars reduce the crib to a tame theological symbol. But the shipwrecked at the stable tremble at the adoration of the Christ-child and quake at the inbreak of God Almighty. Because all the Santa Clauses and red-nosed reindeer, and fifty-foot trees and thundering church bells put together create less pandemonium than the infant Jesus, when instead of remaining a statue in a crib, he comes alive and delivers us over to the fire that he came to light.”

Manning describes the shipwrecked at the stable as “the poor in spirit”. He defines these souls as the ones who “feel lost in the cosmos, adrift on the open sea, clinging with life-and-death desperation to the one solitary plank,” and once they have been stripped of any tendency towards possessiveness, once they have shed the temptation towards sentimental faith, “At the stable in a blinding moment of truth, they make the stunning discovery that Jesus is the plank they have been clinging to without knowing it!”

The shipwrecked, Manning defines, are the one’s who have come to the bitter end of themselves, and know that the subjective feelings of peace and comfort, or the mountain-top experiences of faith are not the plank that sustains. Peace is a person, and when we believe this Truth above all else, and in the face of all else, we can be shipwrecked and saved all at the same time.

“The shipwrecked have stood at the still-point of a turning world and discovered that the human heart is made for Jesus Christ and cannot really be content with less. They cannot take seriously the demands the world makes on them. During Advent they teach us that the more we try to tame and reduce desires, the more we deceive and distort ourselves. We are made for Christ and nothing less will ever satisfy us.”

I have my private reasons for those tears on Sunday. I know where they are coming from. Once you’ve been shipwrecked at the stable—by the stable—you can’t return to “life on the boat”, (to carry Manning’s metaphor a little further.) Once you’ve been wrecked by the realization that Christ is the plank that has sustained you in all of life’s storms, you understand that the presumed safety of the boat is nothing compared to being held by the One who created all things by and for Himself.

Even you.

Staying awake to the Truth this Advent season is a work of its own, and the temptation to ignore our deeper hunger is ever-present. The temptation to weep only over the sentimentality of ceremony, while forgetting (or forsaking) the raw, unrelenting Hope of Christmas is real. Faith and hope are tangled in the paradox of being both a gift, and something we work to hold.

I love Brennan Manning for a number of reasons, but mostly I think because he reminds me that if there’s room in the stable for a drunk priest who struggled to stay sober and awake to the King of Creation for his entire adult life, then there is no one for whom the door to the sanctuary of the stable is not open. In so many ways, we are all stumbling in, tripping over our various sins and omissions, staggering under the weight of knowing we are not who we want to be—not even close—and yet the Plank of salvation can hold it all.

“Let go of your paltry desires and expand your expectations. Christmas means that God has given us nothing less than himself and his name is Jesus Christ. Be unwilling next Christmas to settle for anything else…Don’t be contented with a “nice” Christmas when Jesus has said, ‘It has pleased the Father to give you the Kingdom.’”

It has pleased the Father to give your the Kingdom.

May we find ourselves shipwrecked at last at the stable and weep for joy and in hope over this Promise this season. May we find our deepest hunger fulfilled in the person of Christ alone.

Merry Christmas, friends.

1. Watch For The Light, Plough Publishing House, 2001. “Shipwrecked at the Stable”, Brennan Manning, Pp.184-200