Every longing of the human heart is in last instance, a cry for the Holy Spirit. We build companies, send people to the moon, get drunk and get high, we write Symphonies, gulp down hours of Netflix, become slaves of expectations we have of ourselves or of others or of those that others have of us. We climb up on the one side of K2 and try to snowboard down the other. We get tangled up in a relationship and then try to untangle what we tangled. Why? The Christian would say: you have a hole in your heart. There is only one that can fill it. As if God would call out: You are created for the ocean. Stop swimming in the puddle.
Its heard to dream of oceans, when we’ve been hurt, had to weather storms that have left us drained and tired, have met some sharks that have taken bites out of your hopes. Like someone wrote me after a break up: “I have just buried another set of Life’s expectations and longings.”
How easy it is to put on masks, to pretend one has it all together, to pretend that one is secure and in no need of any exterior affirmation… but how is it when one is alone. And not just physically in a place of solitude, but those moments of being alone with ourselves that rip bear our deepest longings, perhaps touch again those scars that remind of us the fact that we are made for greater things.
And yet, when God dreams the human person, he dreams him in a big way. He has created him for infinite horizons. JP2 once said, commenting on old Testament Prophet Jeremias saying “I am too young” – that someone is merely expressing a deep truth of faith and a truth of psychology when he directs himself to God out of his weakness. And yet, he goes on to say that some would make this weakness of man like the fundamental principal of everything else, raising it almost to the level of human right. And then he goes on to say these words
“Christ, on the other hand, taught us that man has above all a right to his own greatness, a right to what really surpasses him. Because it is precisely here that his special dignity is shown. Here the glorious power of grace is revealed: our true greatness is a gift of the power of the Holy Spirit. In Christ man is now entitled to such greatness. And the Church, through the same Christ, has a right to the gift of such people”.
...das ist das Thema dieser Preidgt., die P. George Elsbett LC am 24.7.2020 in "The Church of the Epiphany" in Georgetown, Washington gehalten hat.
