Second Sunday of Advent: The Desert

 Matthew 3: 1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” ’

Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

‘I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’

In last week’s reflection, I wrote about paying attention and staying in the present moment and, because this is a topic that I believe is so important for our spiritual growth, I am going to make it our Advent theme.

When you reflect on John the Baptist, do you ever wonder what happened when he was out in the desert? All we read about in scripture is that he ate locusts and wild honey and wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt. But we don’t spend much time thinking about what he did out there that prepared him to become a forerunner of Jesus, a voice crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

My guess is that he learned to be in the present moment.

How many of you are experiencing a spiritual desert right now? This is a time when your heart is arid and your spirit doesn’t just thirst for God, it aches for him. It’s a time when scripture holds no comfort and just seems to be trite words, a time when spiritual activities that used to feed you and comfort you seem now to be senseless and boring. This is a time when you worry that you’ve lost your way and you wonder if it’s all your fault; you wonder if you’re praying the wrong prayers, thinking the wrong thoughts or reading the wrong books. It’s a terrible time.

Welcome to John’s desert. It would be safe to assume that John felt called to head out into the wilderness and to take very little with him. He probably even went out with a sense of adventure and a lot of expectations of meeting his God. He most likely went out with certain precepts, laws and principles he strongly believed in and within which he expected God to show himself. For the first while he perhaps did not notice so much that he wasn’t sensing God’s presence as he kept himself busy with his prayer disciplines and was occupied with the basic necessities of life in the desert. But eventually the starkness and emptiness of that desert wilderness must have begun to seep into his soul. Prayers that were so comforting in the old community maybe started losing relevancy. Rituals that spoke to his heart back in the synagogue could have seemed empty and lonely as the sun beat down on him and the wind blew sand in his eyes. The sense of adventure and joy diminishes rapidly in the desert.

Did John doubt himself? Did he doubt the call that drew him out there? Did he wonder if he had made a mistake and God was hiding from him until he figured out what he was really supposed to be doing? I think so and I think this not only because John was human but also because in order to come face to face with God and hear his voice with clarity we first of all have to lose much. We have to lose the idea that anything we do can manipulate God into acting in certain ways or make him love us more. We have to lose distorted perceptions of who God really is. We have to lose our idea that the more we know about God, the more we know him. So much to lose. John had to lose his ideas of God before he could find the pure voice of God, a voice so life shifting that, once heard, it recreates you.

John had to lose all he knew and expected and in that unforgiving desert, he found that the past was long gone and the future was a vast expanse of sand. What was left? The present moment. At first, that present moment seemed as empty as his dry aching spirit but as he focused on what he was called to do in the moment, he began to be more and more aware of the simplicity of God. What was he called to do in the moment? Probably find some locusts and gather some honey so he wouldn’t starve. Gather some firewood for the cold nights. Build a shelter against the sudden wind storm. Find water. Basic stuff. Unexciting stuff. Stuff that would seem to have very little to do with great spiritual revelations. And he was called to speak to his God within these seeming trivialities of life.

Normally those kinds of activities don’t carry a lot of spiritual potential until we pay attention, until our minds stop racing to the past or to the future and until we realize that all we do is holy mystery when we seek God within it. When we learn the art of bowing down before the God of the present moment in the present moment something begins to happen. Where we would once only see dreary and dry tasks, we begin to notice beauty within the ordinary. Where we would once have dismissed situations and people as unimportant to our spiritual growth, we begin to realize that in God’s kingdom, nothing is unimportant. He engages with his angels, with us and with grains of sand with equal delight and individual attention. He is powerfully present in the ordinary and the humble – like in a piece of bread and a sup of wine. We need not look anywhere else.

God pays deep attention to us in the present moment and it is within that present moment that he calls each of us by name. When John had lost all that God called him into the desert to lose, John became attentive and quieter and then he heard his Name:

“John, listen. You are not just John. Listen. You are My Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness. Call my people. Listen. The One whom you seek is coming. Call my people. Listen. You are the Preparer of the Way for him. Call my people. Listen. You are my Baptist. Call my people. Listen. You are my Leveler of Mountains. Call my people. Listen. You are my Straight Highway. Call my people. Listen. You are my Filler of All Valleys. Call my people. Listen!”

John heard this. He heard it on the wind of the present moment. He saw it reflected in the well as he drew water. He saw it written in the stars on the cold clear nights. He heard it in the whir of the locusts’ wings and he tasted it in the honey he swallowed. He knew who he was. He knew his God. Everything he had known before that moment of hearing could not in any way have prepared him for this encounter. Everything had changed – except God. He was right where he had always been. John could not contain the presence of his God and had to cry out to the very wilderness itself, “Prepare the way for the Lord!!”

Do not berate yourself for the desert you are in. Embrace it and seek Jesus, the One who Comes, in all of our present and drearily ordinary moments. In this desert world, be here now. It is a way of preparing the way of the Lord and making his path straight.

He is coming and he is calling your Name.

Watching and Waiting. 1st Sunday

Matthew 24: 37-44

For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Pay attention!

Advent is here and the first thing the readings and the Church tell us is, “Pay attention!” But to what? And why? “Be ready,” says Jesus. For what?  For the mother of all natural disasters? For our co-worker to suddenly disappear before our eyes? For Jesus to come one last time? We pay reverent attention to scripture but after 2000+ years of listening to ones like this week’s Gospel we can start to feel it’s a little like the fable of the boy who cried, “Wolf!”  We listen to the readings and then carry on as if we’re normal.

Certainly, there is no healthy reason to wake up every day expecting it to be the last one before the world implodes and there is no great benefit to keeping fearfully awake wondering if every bump in the night of our souls is a thief or if it’s Jesus coming to either scare us, reprimand us or take us away. So, again, what should we be paying attention to? How does this Gospel apply to us every day and not just in Advent? How can it further our spiritual growth and relationship with the Lord?

Advent: the arrival of a notable person, thing or event. We’re called to pay attention to the arrival of this notable person. Naturally, at this time of year we immediately think of Christmas as the notable event that heralds the arrival of the notable person, Jesus, and Advent is the time of preparation for this arrival. But advent does not mean ‘preparation’; it means the arrival. We are encouraged to use this season to make ourselves mindful of the advent of Jesus and, in terms of our everyday life, he is coming all the time. Pay attention. Jesus comes. Now.

Yesterday has gone, tomorrow never comes and as the old song says, it’s always a day away. Yet, where do our minds most often dwell? We tend to live mostly in the past or in the future. We are rarely present to the present moment or wholly attentive to what is happening right now. Part of us is usually engaged in remembering things that happened before: old wounds and resentments, good times that no longer exist, tasks well done or poorly done, failures, etc. Another part of us is constantly exploring the future: what might happen, distinct possibilities (good and bad), hopes, fears and grim determinations. A very small part of us is in the present dealing with the demands of the moment and for most of us, that small part is very small indeed. If the task of the moment is dull routine, that small part becomes even smaller as our minds roam back and forth between the past and the future. If the demands of the moment are truly demanding and stressful, our proclivity toward visiting the past and the future increases the stress of the moment because our experiences of similar stress shoots us into worried expectations of future consequences.

The problem with this is that when you are spending time in the past or in the future, you are not spending time in God’s reality; you are living in your own past memories and in your future imaginations, which are rarely, if ever, based on the present reality of God. Even when you are remembering how he blessed you at one time or answered a prayer, instead of this memory simply instilling in you a heart of gratitude it usually pulls you into the future with the hopes that he will bless you or answer your prayer in the same way again. If he didn’t bless you or answer a prayer in the past, your future expectations are muted and maybe even hopeless.  Meanwhile, God is in the present moment saying, “Look at me. I’m here. The past belongs to me and the future is actually none of your business. Be with me here, now.”

So hard, isn’t it? It’s especially difficult when the present moment is either extremely dull and lonely or else is full of maximum stress. It’s so hard to stay there and pay attention because for some odd reason, when we spend time in the past or in the future we feel we’re more in control. Or at least we feel there’s potential for control if we can get it all together and figure out exactly what should be happening and then make it happen. When we talk about trusting the Lord, staying in the moment is an act of supreme trust. It means that we leave the past in his hands and assume that he can and will create our future according to his word, not according to our limited expectations.

We need to pay attention to the present moment because that’s when and where he comes. Every moment is an advent of our God and every moment we spend in waiting and being attentive is a season of preparation for a full awareness of his presence. I totally believe that all of us continually miss a multitude of quiet but astounding advents simply because they are quiet and don’t fall within our set expectations. It’s difficult to hear a gentle whisper when your mind and heart are filled with the raucous clamor of the past and future, a clamor that forms your ideas of how God should come.

The times when I have learned best the beautiful and powerful mystery of staying in the present moment have been during some times of extreme pressure and stress where it seemed like there was far too much to accomplish in the time given, where there was no leeway in terms of deadlines and expectations and where it felt like everything was going very badly. During these times, as long as I stayed in the present moment and focused only on the immediate task at hand, and spoke to the Lord only about what I was doing in that moment even if that task was something mundane, like combing my hair, I was fine. As soon as I allowed my mind to roam and latch on to all that was left to accomplish or on to a bad turn of events or something somebody said or did that wounded me, everything inside of me would fly apart. I would immediately be completely overwhelmed, filled with either fear or resentment and sometimes frozen with no idea how to proceed in the midst of such chaos.

When I stayed in the moment, not only was I much more calm but I would continually be amazed at how well things went and how tasks that seemed virtually impossible were accomplished and accomplished well within the given time frame and in harmony with those I was working with. Was I aware in all those present moments of a distinct, strong and tangible presence of God? No, I was not. But somehow, at the end of it all there had grown within me a sense of his continual presence that is independent of what is happening or on my expectations being met or on amazing things taking place. I lose that sense whenever I visit the past or the future. He is not there. That’s not where I find him.

The Advent/Christmas season is chaotic in itself and just because it’s the Christmas season, it doesn’t mean that all the heavy expectations, wounds and struggles you’ve been dealing with recently are easily put aside so you can concentrate on the demands of Christmas. Don’t berate yourself or the world for the pressures and demands of Advent and Christmas. Embrace it. Remember that it was into a world of wounded and materialistic chaos that Jesus was born, very quietly, unobtrusively and in a way that met no one’s expectations. This Advent season, try to remember that every moment is an Advent of our God. In the midst of incredible busyness and heavy demands on your time and heart, commit to endeavoring to stay in the moment while you simply focus on the task right before you in that moment and you watch and wait for God.  You will have to adjust your expectations as to how he will come – or better yet, you will have to completely lose those expectations. He comes in very surprising ways and you can miss him just because you have set ideas of how he comes or how he should come. The way he comes to one person will be completely different to how he comes to another. This is your watching and your waiting. 

As the entrance antiphon (Psalm 25: 1-3) for this Sunday says:

“To you, my God, I lift my soul and trust in you; let me never come to shame. Do not let my enemies laugh at me. No one who waits for you is ever put to shame.”

Hear that? No one who waits for God is ever put to shame. Be here now. He is coming.

Goodness Gracious...

The leaders scoffed at Jesus saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

We have such a gracious King.

When celebrating the kingship of Jesus, we come face to face with the tension between the worldly definition of Kingly power and the heavenly definition because Jesus turned all the definitions upside down and redefined what it means to be King. One of the most powerful examples of his brand of kingship was his response to the thief on the cross beside him. Gracious. He was gracious beyond what we can fathom. He was nailed to the one place where not even the Father would have faulted him for being completely swallowed up by his own agony and still, Jesus remembered who he was and what he was called to be: an incarnation of the Grace of God.

I’m sure all of you have encountered a gracious person at least once in your life. Have you ever stopped to analyze what made that person seem gracious to you? What did they do? How did they act that made you appreciate just being in their presence? What was their response to you and others that made them so attractive?

We appreciate graciousness wherever we find it but one place where we are really blessed is when we encounter gracious behavior in our priests. The priest in the parish we belong to is a very gracious man and, no doubt, there are many gracious priests in this diocese – as well as in your diocese, wherever that may be. However, we have all been disappointed by priests who were not reflections of God’s gracious love and many wounds have been sustained by the body due to this lack. My response to that is: how many people have been wounded by the same lack of graciousness in us?

We, the Royal Priesthood, have exactly the same responsibility as ministerial priests to be beautiful and accurate reflections of God’s graciousness. We are called to be People of Grace and we are called to be a Gracious People. We are dignified daughters and sons of God and Christ the King is our brother.  It behooves us to become a little more familiar with Kingly behavior as it was and is defined by Jesus and then ask ourselves if we exhibit the kind of behavior that makes others feel worthwhile and blessed in our presence.

Note how Jesus responded to the thief. He did not make the thief go through a full account of his sins. The thief was already suffering the natural consequences of his failures and that was enough. Jesus, engulfed in exactly the same suffering as the thief, even though he didn’t deserve it, did not respond to the thief or to the situation with judgments of good versus bad or right versus wrong. Jesus did not lecture, reprimand, demand restitution or require a complete change of character before he welcomed the thief.  And he didn’t harbor any resentment whatsoever that as a good person he was suffering just as much as this bad person. What he did was immediately become the thief’s best friend. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Gracious.

The gracious person is not hung up on appearances and does not make judgments. In the welcoming heart of a gracious person, it is not a shock that a thief can enter paradise on the arm of the king. Gracious people are free of self-judgment that says, “I’m pretty good” or “I’m pretty bad” but instead, focuses on appreciating the beauty and value that God sees in them and which allows them to appreciate the immense beauty and value of others – even those who don’t meet the accepted criteria of goodness or value.

We say off the top of our heads that others certainly have value because our Christian theology teaches that Christ died for the whole world. But generally what we really mean when talking about the value of those who do not meet our standards of goodness or right thinking is that they have ‘potential value’ or that they have not reached ‘full value’. Presumably, they will reach full value when they meet certain criteria such as recognizing the error of their ways, apologizing, changing their behavior or their belief system or coming back to church. The problem with this attitude, besides that it doesn’t reflect the nature of our King, is that we get caught up in having to watch and strictly maintain our own righteousness, something we have no capacity to do. It’s a jagged and weary circle of judgment and somehow the King of unconditional love gets left out of the loop. 

Truly gracious people have experienced true grace, know they are loved and therefore assume that everyone they meets is a co-receptor of God’s full love and is worthy of utter respect, attention and appreciation. This is why you enjoy being with a gracious person. You feel special. You feel valued and respected for who you are, as you are.

It is good to practice to be gracious toward everyone you encounter but it will be a bit of a struggle to maintain a consistently gracious manner unless you have consistent encounters with our gracious King. I think we often think of grace as a thing, either something God gives to us in order to overcome a specific struggle (actual grace) or what we receive in baptism, the divine life that infuses our souls (sanctifying grace). Grace is all of that but it’s pretty dry theology until you experience the utter beauty of being in the presence of a gracious King who only has eyes for you, who is delighted that you have come as you are and tells you that he has been waiting and wants to sit with you at the banquet. When you have personally spent time being the focal point of gracious and joyful love, that’s when you begin to understand the fullness and wideness of true graciousness. That’s when you fall deeply in love with your King. That’s when you fall in love with how the King sees you and others and that’s when you begin to yearn to emulate the gracious dignity of your King. Then grace becomes an overflow from loved received rather than an outer action that can easily break down, allowing you to get caught up again in self-judgment and in the judgment of others.

 St. John of the Cross wrote:

When you regarded me

Your eyes imprinted your grace in me,

In this, you loved me again,

And thus my eyes merited

To also love what you see in me….

Let us go forth together to see ourselves in your beauty.

(Spiritual Canticle, 32, 33)

Be regarded by the King. Be imprinted by Grace.

On Our Way Home

Luke 21:5-19

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’

They asked him, ‘Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?’ And he said, ‘Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and, “The time is near!” Do not go after them.

‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’ Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

 ‘But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

This scripture reminds me of a book that was on bestseller lists in the early 70’s titled  “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey. This book convincingly linked scriptural passages with current events of that time and predicted with great confidence that the end times would definitely occur in the 1980’s.

Whoops. 

Obviously, the world is still very much with us. I think I’ve said this before but it’s my personal belief that if someone stumbles on some esoteric key to accurately predicting the time of the apocalypse and Christ’s return, God will immediately change the time. In Isaiah God says, “Now I am revealing new things to you, things hidden and unknown to you, created just now, this very moment; of these things you have heard nothing until now, so that you cannot say, ‘Oh, yes, I knew all this.”

The fact is, when the end times will take place is none of our business. The Church does not bring these scriptures to our attention to scare us or make us start looking around for obscure, or not so obscure, signs that the world is in a complete downward spiral and God is pretty much winding things up. We need to remember that “…this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come.” (Heb. 13:14) and in 1 Peter, chapter 2, right after he tells us that we are a royal priesthood, Peter says that we are ‘visitors and pilgrims’.

In other words, we don’t belong here. We're visitors. Don’t get too settled.

In the Nov. 5^th second reading, Paul says , “But our citizenship is in heaven and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 3.) We need to understand that we belong to another country and it is from that country that our Savior came, comes and will come again. We don’t belong here. We are naturalized citizens of this world but everything within us wants to go home. That’s why we experience vague (and not so vague) feelings of dissatisfaction and unnamed longings. That’s why, no matter what we do and accomplish in this world, there is still a hole within that wants to be filled. Whether we recognize it or not, everything within us aches for Jesus to come and take us Home where we belong, where we fit, where we are loved and valued simply for who we are, not for what we do and accomplish.

Do we have to wait until death frees us from this world in order to find out who we really are? Absolutely not. Jesus is always coming to us, calling us by our true names but we are too often listening to other strident voices and other false names and we miss his soft and beautiful voice. It's hard not to allow the values of the world to name us and define us. We are encouraged to seek our identities in our roles, vocations, natural talents and accomplishments and it’s contrary to how we’ve been taught to think to grasp that God does not value us for what we do but for who he created each of us to be. It’s difficult to wrap our heads around that one when all our lives we have been taught that our value depends on fitting into the norm, whatever that norm may be.

It is good to be responsible citizens of this world and of the Church. It’s good to strive to use our gifts and develop our capabilities. It’s good and right to discern our vocations. Finding our true value doesn’t mean dispensing with these things. It means going beyond them. It means going higher, deeper and wider. If we do not discover our individual spiritual identity, the rest of it will never satisfy and it will never ever feel like we’ve done enough. You could be totally called to be a dedicated single, a spouse, a parent or a Religious. But these vocations will not fill up all the chasms in your heart until you know your true Name - the name God calls you by.

I need to emphasize this: if you don’t know who you are, you will always feel like you’re not quite measuring up. No matter how much you try to do and accomplish what you feel is expected of you, it will never feel like you've done enough or that you've received enough. You can avoid facing these feelings of inadequacy and inner hunger by keeping really busy doing everything you feel is expected of you but eventually when you stop – or when something like illness stops you – you will still come face to face with the knowledge that all you have done and everything you thought was validating you and defining you was not enough and never will be enough.

Stop! Stop and take time to realize that not only did Christ come into the world and not only will he be coming again but also that he is coming every moment of every day. He is coming NOW. There will one day be a day of worldly apocalypse and then Christ will come riding on the clouds one last time but before that time we are all going through our own large and small apocalyptic-like events where we are wounded, where our insecurity is uncovered and we are threatened, frightened, exposed and made to feel we are not good enough.  These upheavals in our lives make us cry out for Home. And Jesus comes. He comes from Home and as he comes he calls us by Name. He never comes to punish. He comes with vindication that the world can never give. He comes to say, “Take heart. You’re on your way Home. I know you lost your way because you’re alien to this world but I know who you are and I haven’t lost you. You are in my sight and in my grip. You are not alone.”

You do not belong here. You do not ‘fit’. But Jesus came and showed us all how to make it through as a stranger in a strange land. He knew his True Names and he knew exactly who he was. It is now his desire to come and share with you the ultimate joy and full satisfaction of knowing your name. He comes to bring Home to you until it's time to come and bring you Home. When you hear him call your True Name it will be like receiving a piece of Home to carry with you in your heart until the end.

And it will be enough.

Unblogability

There will be no reflection this week due to a minor flare up of RSI in my arm. Renovations will do that. Caution and rest are called for to keep it from being a major flare up.

I'll be back next week, God willing.

Blessings,
Jean