The Potter and the Clay

The Prophet Isaiah once prayed (64:1-8), “You are the Potter, and we are the clay…”

There is a book that I have found to be deeply moving, called, The Holy Longing, written by a priest named Ronald Rolheiser. The premise of the book is that there is within each of us an unquenchable fire. There is “a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, an all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and it is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal…” And what we do with this inner fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality.

He writes this, “Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicitly religious idea, we (all) act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter.”

The real question is, What is shaping us?

Because we all are being shaped by something… We can be shaped by angst and fear, by tribalism, by desire, by what we watch and what we read… We can be shaped by our past… and by what we looking for going forward…

What is channeling that inner fire in you? What is shaping it?

We live in a time of great unease, global conflict, and tremendous uncertainty. And this time of year, even within the great joy of this season, there can be a franticness, a loneliness, an aching…

Perhaps the wisdom of our faith is to mark the boundaries of a season in which we name our longings, we name our brokenness, and we name the hope that we have.

In this season of Advent, may we place our hearts and lives back into the Potter’s hands… and may we ever be re-molded, re-shaped by the love we see in the coming of Christ.

Let us pray: God of Hope, we thank you for this holy season, and for your love for each of us… Shape us and mold us more and more into the image of your Son Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.