When Longing Exposes the Heart

Impatience, Embarrassment, and Learning to Stay with Christ

“We should desire to enter so deeply into the heart of Christ that we never find our way back out again.”

St Philip Neri

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There is a part of me that is always moving ahead of where I actually am. It imagines paths opening, doors being unlocked, lives taking on a new shape. It dreams of disappearing into contemplation, of finding a form of life that would finally gather together all the scattered pieces of my longing into something whole and recognizable. I tell myself it is about God, and in a way it is. But there is also a hunger in it for purpose, for clarity, for a place where I would no longer feel so exposed or unfinished.

Sometimes that hunger betrays me in ways that are painfully human. It slips out in awkward questions, in anxious glances toward those who hold authority, in foolish little moments like sending a message meant for someone else to an abbot, revealing too much of my hope and my fear at once. I wish I could pretend those moments do not matter. I wish I could hide them behind pious words. But they matter because they show me what is really in my heart. They show me how badly I want to be seen, chosen, gathered in.

And when that is exposed, it hurts. It is humiliating to realize how much I am still grasping, how easily my peace depends on whether someone answers me or grants me something. It is painful to see how quickly my prayer becomes entangled with my plans. Yet it is precisely there, in that small humiliation, that something true begins to happen. The illusion that I am simply a contemplative seeking God is stripped away, and what remains is a needy man who wants to belong.

That is where Christ waits.

He does not wait for me at the end of some imagined path. He waits in the very place where my illusions fall apart. He waits in the moment when I realize that even my most spiritual desires are mixed with fear and longing for recognition. He waits in the ache that follows embarrassment, when I am forced to stand without a mask before Him and admit that I do not know how to be still.

And in that place He is not withholding Himself. In the very space where I am not chosen, not answered, not settled, Christ is already giving Himself to me. The waiting itself has become a form of His presence. I am not standing outside the door of my life until God finally opens it. I am discovering that He is already standing with me here.

St Philip Neri understood this. When he said that we should desire to enter so deeply into the heart of Christ that we never find our way back out again, he was not speaking about escaping the mess of being human. He was speaking about being so gathered into Christ that even our restlessness, our impatience, and our awkward neediness are carried into Him and transfigured.

To stay, as I am being asked to stay, is not simply to remain in one place or one situation. It is to stay with Christ in the place where I am most exposed. It is to stop running toward a future version of myself that seems more holy, more purposeful, more complete, and instead to offer the unfinished self I am right now. It is to let my longing be purified by not immediately getting what it wants.

This is a kind of crucifixion. The part of me that wants to move ahead, to secure a form of life that will justify me, has to be laid down. It has to learn that God is not found by rushing forward but by consenting to be held in the present, even when that present feels small, awkward, and painfully ordinary.

Lord, forgive me for my impatience. Forgive me for wanting to turn Your will into a solution to my anxiety. Draw me not into some imagined future but into Your heart here and now. Let me enter so deeply into You that even my embarrassing hopes and my wounded longing are lost in Your mercy. Let me stay with You until I no longer need to escape myself, because I am finally resting in You.