Yearning is perhaps best typed in italics because its modus operandi involves leaning into life. All genuine earthly yearnings are expressions of the one deep longing for the One Intimacy from which we come and in which we experience peace, taste life, and know love. This is why yearning is always tinged with sadness and loneliness, even as it alludes to delight and tilts toward promise. This is why to yearn is at once exhausting and enlivening, painful and exhilarating, heartbreaking and encouraging. ~ Dan Miller

Part of the understated beauty of the season of ADVENT is how it holds the tension between dark and light, outcry and the heard cry, struggle and hope, sorrow and joy, grief and praise, yearning and fulfillment. It is the reality of the first word in each of these pairs that makes the second term so poignant and meaningful and enlivening and up lifting. The world into which Jesus is born as the Word of God is indeed bleak—an old word taken out of the wooden chest stored in the attic and recycled, given more air play these last months and years—reminding us today that the gospel of Jesus which is the Word or Story of enduring life, is not the least bit Pollyannaish or quaint or holly-jolly or as easy to sip as hot spiced wine with a cinnamon stick. The good news has to be at least a bit bigger, grittier, inspiring, and more enticing than the temptation to cave to the struggle or fear or creeping despair.

I like the song below by Sting because it captures the spirit of this season which invites us simultaneously to be still and still moving; to be all too aware of the bleakness of winter and yet awake with the not so secret yearning for the hidden but hoped-for light of Christmas. Sting’s song, he explains, is an amalgamation of a Gaelic song from the Isle of Skye about longing for home played by the harpist Mary Macmaster and his reworking of a favorite boyhood poem by Robert Louis Stevenson titled “Christmas at Sea.”

The poem is about a crew-member on a ship and the ferocious, life-or-death struggle of steering clear of the rocky coast line in a winter storm in the dark of night. Juxtaposed with this turbulent scene at sea is the village that sets tranquilly atop the cliff just above where the seamen battle for their lives. During the tireless fight against the sea and wind the sailor realizes two profundities that move him deeply: first, that it is Christmas Day, and second, that the lighted village above the cliff is the town where he was born.

There is a certain melancholic beauty to this anticarol, as it were, in which the peace of Christmas and the yearning thought of home are heightened because it is so near to the struggle that lurks below. Regret and hope are so near, yet so different. It reminds us not to sentimentalize either Advent or Christmas, but to remember that these seasons allude to and capture the fact that the Christ-life is about life-and-death and that the birth and path of the Prince of Peace born into this world requires both the surrender—say, of a teenage mother— and the struggle—say, of a young sailor. Jesus, a vulnerable infant born into this world, makes it his home, so that we who are so vulnerable to the wind and waves of the world, can make our home in him.

CHRISTMAS AT SEA

♦ Christmas at Sea (Robert Louis Stevenson’s original poem)

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every ‘long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
‘All hands to loose top gallant sails,’ I heard the captain call.
‘By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,’ our first mate, Jackson, cried.
… ‘It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,’ he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

 ♣ ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION ONLINE? Would you benefit from having a trustworthy companion to listen with you to your hopes, struggles, yearnings, burning questions? Someone who will hold space for you and pay attention with you to your quiet desire to cultivate a life of spiritual depth and meaning, as well as to deepen your connection to the One from whom all wonder, joy, and blessings flow? I am offering spiritual direction online. If you, or someone you know, are interested in beginning or returning to spiritual guidance CLICK HERE where you will find both practical information and explanations of spiritual direction. I’d be honored to hear and hold your unfolding story.