This Advent I have had a particular insight that has blessed me immensely. I’ll share it in short.
I strongly dislike unresolved situations. Anticipating a stressful event, knowing someone is still angry with me, living with an incomplete project, waiting on the results of a test, watching another suffer in the face of an uncertain future. Situations like these make it nearly impossible for me to live fully in the present, attend to my present duties, while also striking at the heart of my ability to pray in the present Presence of God. Which is ALL prayer.
And because these future uncertainties are innumerable in life, with few respites, life in the here-and-now can so easily become like an always partially unrooted tree, ready to topple over in the next wind gust.
I know this is probably a “duh” to most of you, but for whatever reason this Advent I realized the problem I describe is precisely the heart of Advent’s golden grace. Advent is learning to live fully in the present moment, in our messy, untidy, incomplete, frayed edge, loose-end world. By living in hope. Divine hope.
The gift of hope from God allows a miraculous thing: an act of trust so radical, it allows you to welcome — and live in — the not-yet Future of God as an already realized reality. We become like Mary of the Advent, whose present uncertainties are already wholly pregnant with the Promise of God.
For whatever reason, these lines from Psalm 4 captured all of this for me, and strengthened my ability to embrace a bit more the present moment in the face of an unfinished future:
I called, the God of justice gave me answer;
from anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!
“What can bring us happiness?” many say.
Lift up the light of your face on us, O LORD.
You have put into my heart a greater joy
than abundance of grain and new wine can provide.
In peace I will lie down and fall asleep,
for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.
Advent affected my ability to sleep, following the Master who slept deeply beneath his Father’s wings, in his mother’s arms, in the bow of the boat and in the tomb.
May these last days of Advent grant us all the grace to live in hope of Love’s faithful triumph, so we can enter more fully the rest of God and “sleep in heavenly peace.”
Neal Obstat Theological Opining 
That sense of wanting resolution and being out of sorts until then… unable to rest easily in the present in the interim. I sense we are faced always with being in both chronic temporal restlessness of the Augustinian sort and the suprareality of the availability of eternal peace in Him… both/and… hard work (for me)to choose to keep my gaze on Him, to not be distracted by the swirling stormy seas.
Still, I find encouragement that this tension itself, this long slog of ‘will this ever pass’ is itself a litttle shoot of green cracking through the soil…this awareness that we were made for a perpetual peace that we haven’t grasped yet is good because it means we have hope for (and thus an awareness) of what we were made for.
Gabriel Marcel: “The less life is experienced as a captivity the less the soul will be able to to see the shining of that veiled mysterious light which we feel sure without any analysis, illumines the very centre of hope’s dwelling place.”
Thank you for this post. I am encouraged to learn that I am “not the only one” who struggles to stay in God’s presence, and moreso grateful for this reflection and encouragement to keep working at it.
“the very centre of hope’s dwelling place” is a magnificent phrase — thank you for introducing me to it. We are all in this together.
This post was such a blessing to me. Staying in the moment, instead of always wrapped up in future anxieties, is a real struggle for me, which I was literally identifying today myself as stemming from a lack of hope. Your words spoke directly to me, and the song you included at the end as well – Only in God has been my family’s “song” since I was a child, and my aunt and uncle (musicians) sang it at our wedding. It is a message I need to return to and remember.
That is such a blessing to hear the way my work resonates on others’ lives, Abby — may Christ grant you this grace these holy days. Thank you for commenting