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COLUMNS
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» In Light of Faith
 
Second Sunday in Advent, Cycle A, December 9, 2007
by Genevieve McQuade
A darker season began a month ago with progressively earlier evenings. Night’s darkness now lulls our complacency.
Lengthening nights nevertheless surrender to daybreak, signaling its wake-up call. As our lethargy must break into consciousness, so too, the darkness of our complacency needs an inner crack of dawn to expose misleading mindsets.
Like that crack of dawn, John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1–12) tells us to snap out of easy habits. He exclaims his urgent call for our radical conversion, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand...Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
We’ve heard this before, and may disregard his directive. The herald advised a u-turn from the crookedness of idols to re-route ourselves for Christ. False idols exert power when we don’t recognize them or their effect on us.
During Advent, demands of “The” holidays can emerge like shadows extending our slumber. “Preparation” becomes the byword for both the holidays and our liturgical season.
Routinely, we get ready for many things. Now, lists perceptibly lengthen in the brevity of Advent’s few weeks towards Christmas. Inevitably, we become too busy. Pressures mount for us to be ready for everything from planning feasts to gift shopping to card writing, and more, not to mention profuse, home decorating.
Our activities can be rewarding, but placed on pedestals of excessive attention and time, they wield power captivating us with visions of sugarplums dancing in unremitting twilight.
Our secular culture has enlarged them to iconic proportions; our logic blurs in their shadows.
Could such icons be deceptive idols? What is the focus of the season of your life? What cloaks you with false realities?
Advent’s purpose is to prepare our spirits for the remembrance of the awesome Incarnation of the Son of God that joined mystery and love with humanity in Jesus. Dare we permit our u-turn to veer off to a dusky road of complacency?
So then, how can we transcend time-honored ways without eliminating favored behaviors? Let us be led more by Christ than by custom. We can reevaluate habits, trim expectations, and better inform ourselves about the Christian meanings and purpose of both Advent and our Christmas preparations.
The Baptist had just finished explaining he merely baptized with water for repentance, adding that Jesus would do far more, would baptize with the Holy Spirit — and fire.
Fire is what happens in radical conversion to Christ. The dawn to new life in Christ is far more than repentance and behavior modification. John also instructs us to “produce good fruit as evidence” of our repentance.
The heart of the matter is that the Holy Spirit’s fire burns away complacency, straightens our path, and generates the fruit. That holy fire awakens us to full discipleship as we react to the dynamism of the Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 11:2 lists the gifts of the Holy Spirit, sacramentally given to us. They sanctify us and empower our fruitfulness. With brightened mindsets, we perceive our lives more truthfully.
Turn toward our true God in preparation for the rising of True Dawn, Jesus Christ.
With childlike simplicity, ask God for his presents of divine gifts and the fire of the Holy Spirit upon yourself — now. Truly, you can accomplish life’s preparations enthusiastically, producing good fruit as proof of an enlightened repentance. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
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Advent takes on a different meaning for elderly
by Mary Hood Hart
Recently I was asked to participate in a Mass offered at a local nursing home. Our parish offers Mass monthly at this facility, and typically about a dozen residents are well enough to attend. All the residents come in wheelchairs.
Among those present a few were able to fully participate in the liturgy. The others faded in and out.
One lady in her late 80s, whom I know well from when she came to daily Mass at the parish, is very infirm. Always spunky and independent, she has declined dramatically in the last few months.
From all outward appearances, she is near death. Barely conscious, unable to lift her head, incongruously dressed in a pastel pink sweater, she was strapped into the wheelchair, and ushered to the activity room where Mass was celebrated. When the priest greeted her, she brightened, but most of the time she appeared unaware of what was going on around her.
Also at the Mass was a husband of one of the residents. In his mid-90s, he visits his wife, an Alzheimer’s victim, every day. His loving devotion to his wife is exemplified by his constant presence at the nursing home and the gentleness with which he cares for her and interacts with her even though she is unable to respond.
Participating in the Eucharistic meal at the nursing home, I was in the presence of the blessed — the poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn.
I was in the presence of blessedness, although it was not blessedness the world would recognize. Failing bodies and failing minds are not prized in a culture that promotes self-reliance, independence.
Yet this cluttered activity room in a nursing home where the Mass took place was holy ground.
As I left Mass that morning, knowing I was charged with writing a column on Advent, I contemplated Advent in light of the blessedness I had just experienced.
The Advent experience of waiting took on an entirely new dimension when I considered it in light of the residents of the nursing home, the faithful who, the world would say, have only death to wait for.
Unlike the rest of us, busying ourselves with Christmas preparations, these blessed are responsible for no official preparations of the season.
Unlike most of us, their contributions are passive ones.
With little to offer in return, they accept the care, the good will, the gifts and kindness of others.
Unlike us, they are unconcerned with the number of days until Christmas. For many, time has already become meaningless.
They are no longer bound by its chronological passage. Even though their daily routine is at the mercy of an institutional timetable, many of them have entered kairos, God’s time. The clock and calendar have no more power over them.
It is in this state of helplessness, this state of dependency, this state of timelessness they have entered into the Advent experience more fully than the rest of us can possibly imagine.
In the last stage of life, they are suspended in a condition of pure expectancy. Like the Christ child in Mary’s womb, they are utterly dependent, utterly helpless, surrounded by humble and challenging circumstances, waiting, yes, waiting, not for a particular event, but for a transformation.
With no days to count down, no preparations to plan, their Advent experience is a simple yet profound offering, a prayer of the deepest kind — a complete surrender of self into the loving arms of God.
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 The movie ‘Lions for Lambs’
by Barbara Hughes
I typically wait for movies to come out on DVD but a few weeks ago my husband and I decided the film, “Lions for Lambs” would be worth the cost of the tickets.
With an all-star cast, it seemed to have promise, but at the end of the movie, I looked at him and asked, “Is that it?”
In fact, the end of the film was a non-ending and our first reaction was disappointment.
However, it turned out to be one of those experiences that followed me home and continued to play over in my mind during the weeks that followed. I realized the reason for our disappointment, not to mention the movie critics who gave it only two stars, was that it hit a little too close to real life. It crossed the line. It was neither fiction nor a documentary and therefore viewers weren’t entertained.
Unlike reality TV that is typically so preposterous that we can only view it through the lenses of fiction. This film caught movie goers off guard.
Those who came wanting to be entertained left disappointed. Those who came looking for answers about war and cultural change left with more questions than answers.
Instinctively we look for happy endings and solutions to problems. We seek closure to traumatic experiences that are beyond our capacity to change. When the movie provided neither, it left viewers feeling unsettled.
In an interview about the film, Robert Redford said his motivation for the movie was to challenge the generation of young people who are moving into adulthood.
It’s an age-old challenge. As those who have moved past their prime look back, they often feel disappointment when the dreams they held as youth have gone unfulfilled. They feel the same way when the wrongs they hoped to right not only still exist, but seem to have multiplied while they were at the wheel.
In the movie, Redford plays a college professor who responds by challenging a student who he believes exhibits great potential.
The unsettling thing about the film is that the audience never gets to find out if the student takes the challenge.
If he accepted the challenge, questions such as what are his strategies and how will he implement them are never even addressed. And in that respect, the movie reflects real life.
Rarely do we live long enough to see the fruits of our labor. Not many people will understand in the course of a lifetime what impact their life has left on society or at least on family members, friends or colleagues.
Life is rife with ambiguities, paradoxes and unsolved problems. I suspect the reason that the movie “It’s a Great Life” is so popular and is played over and over every December is that George Bailey gets to see how he helped change his corner of the world. The rest of us simply have to take it on faith.
But if we do the best we can, and look and act upon grace present in every moment, then the Kingdom of God will continue to unfold.
And isn’t that what the season of Advent is about? It’s about reflecting on humanity’s lot before the coming of the Messiah and putting into practice the teachings of Jesus in anticipation of the coming of the Kingdom of God in all its fullness.
Faith and trust generate hope. But faith doesn’t provide a window through which we can preview the eschatological coming of Christ. If it did, faith would be irrelevant, for we would possess that which we are called to believe in its absence.
Even Jesus didn’t see the fullness of the Kingdom during his lifetime. He announced the Kingdom is in our midst, which means it’s a work in progress and that we are part of the construction crew.
Faith calls us to continue the process in whatever way it presents itself in the context of our life. It also calls us to point the way for others, even in the face of rejection, betrayal and seeming failure.
In doing so, we become more like the God Incarnate in whose footsteps we have all been invited to walk.
As the world continues to groan in anticipation of a better world, wars are waged, earthquakes tumble buildings like a house of cards and villages are swept away by waters that bring death instead of life. We watch the news and experience heartache, feel disappointment and are bombarded with a barrage of unanswered questions.
We want answers, we seek reassurance. The reality is: we have them all in the Word Made Flesh.
Jesus’ coming fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that said the Lion will lie down with the lamb and it gives us hope. Each person is called to do their part and to make sure that hope gets translated into reality, one person; one cause at a time.
Our global world no longer has borders, all the better to embrace the lion and the lamb. Jesus gave us the strategy in the Sermon on the Mount in the Beatitudes. Now it’s up to us to implement it.
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Copyright © 2006 The Catholic Virginian Press. Articles from Catholic News Services, including Fr. Dietzen’s column, may not be reproduced here due to copyright considerations.
The Catholic Virginian is a biweekly publication serving the people of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond. This website includes some, but not all, of the articles from the print version of The Catholic Virginian.
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