Longing is meant to be a transforming mysticism within our lives. It creates the energy for metamorphosis. For him, the desire for higher love-making was the spirit that burned inside of Jesus, the energy that motivated him and consumed, as by fire, all the more limited desires within him. He was insane for the light, on fire with God's eros, willing to die so as to be transformed and so offer the world the widest love of all, God's embrace. In Jesus, we see what it means to be redeemed from fire by fire.
Advent celebrates human longing.
It asks us not to deny our longings but to enter them, deepen them, and widen them until we become insane enough for the light so that, like the butterfly, we open ourselves to undergo a metamorphosis.