A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:3)

What is it like when you are getting ready for someone to come?  How do you prepare, say, for guests? You might clean the house and go to the grocery store and prepare food and sweep the sidewalk or the porch.  Then what?

You wait for the guests to arrive. 

And once you begin waiting, there is a change in your position relative to the guests: you are no longer the one in control.  Who is in control?  The ones you are waiting for.  You can make phone calls (Where are you? I’m waiting!), send a text, complain to the neighbors —but you can’t make the arrival happen.  The guests may get here on time, or early, or late – or not at all.  All you can do is wait for them to show up.

Your time no longer belongs to you, but to the one who is coming.  This is true whether you are waiting for guests or simply to board a plane; whether waiting in a doctor’s office, or waiting for the plumber to come.  It is true when we are waiting for an elevator or for the pedestrian walk signal at an intersection (perhaps pushing the button over and over, even though we know it doesn’t do any good).

There is a helplessness involved in waiting.  And we generally don’t like it when we’re not in control.  But how we want to be in control!  How we detest having to wait, powerless to hurry things along.

If we can’t control guests or elevators or walk signals, even less can we control the coming of God.  Waiting for God brings us into a sacred darkness and helplessness.  If we are really waiting, if we have truly accepted to wait, we have let go of our need to control and have acknowledged the sovereignty of God.  This is a helplessness that can be thought of as falling into the hands of God.  When we choose to wait with our whole being, we slip into God’s time, rather than the illusory time we think is our own.

Fr. Pedro Arrupe was a saintly Jesuit, the superior general of the Society of Jesus for eighteen years.  In 1981 Fr. Arrupe suffered a massive stroke which left him virtually helpless.  These are words that he wrote to the General Congregation in 1983:

More than ever, I now find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. And this is still the one thing I want. But now there is a difference: the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in his hands.

The “initiative is entirely with God,” he said.  The acceptance, though, was Father Arrupe’s.  He now had control of almost nothing except for that holy assent.  He lived for ten years in this helplessness.

So in our own waiting, too, in our human helplessness to hurry God along or to save ourselves or to control God in any way—this helplessness can be the occasion of a holy acceptance, a holy giving over of ourselves into the hand of God.

But our helplessness is not hopelessness, because God comes.  Christ always comes.  And the hand of God is the very best place to wait, no matter what else is going on in our lives.  Christ is always coming, yet always with us. We wait for God in God.  We wait for the Christ who is already here waiting for us.  We wait for the transformation of all things, trusting, as Karl Rahner says to God, “that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart.”

Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him.  (Psalm 37:7 KJV)

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Shepherd drawing by Rose Hoover, rc.

(Isaiah 11:9)

Wisdom from Rabbi Abraham Heschel:

What is history?  Wars, victories, and wars.  So many dead.  So many tears.  So little regret.  So many fears… The world is drenched in blood, and the guilt is endless…

This is what the prophets discovered.  History is a nightmare.  There are more scandals, more acts of corruption, than are dreamed of in philosophy.  It would be blasphemous to believe that what we witness is the end of God’s creation.  It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final.  Others may be satisfied with improvement, the prophets insist upon redemption.  The way [humanity] acts is a disgrace, and it must not go on forever.  Together with condemnation, the prophets offer a promise.  The heart of stone will be taken away, a heart of flesh will be given instead (Ezek. 11:19).  Even the nature of the beasts will change to match the glory of the age.  The end of days will be the end of fear, the end of war; idolatry will disappear, knowledge of God will prevail.

(The Prophets)

And again from the prophet Isaiah:

On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.

On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.’  (19:23-25)

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.  (Galatians 3:28)

If this is to be true of believers, it is so only because it is already true in the resurrected Jesus Christ himself. We glimpse it in his earthly life, and it becomes literally fulfilled in the Resurrection.

What more then will there be with the Second Coming of Christ than with his Incarnation and his Resurrection?

Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him. (Revelation 1:7)

After the Resurrection of Jesus, only his disciples saw him—or at least only they knew who he was, and even they had some difficulty recognizing him. Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener; and the couple on the road to Emmaus did not recognize Jesus until he broke the bread at supper. But at the end, we read, “every eye will see him.”

Perhaps this means not only that geographical boundaries will no longer exist (for no matter where we happen to be, we shall see him); but neither will we be hindered by those interior boundaries of the human heart which may now prevent us from recognizing and receiving the divine goodness and beauty. Even those of us who have pierced his heart (for it is not only at the crucifixion that Christ is wounded)—by our rejection, our sins, our blindness, our turning away, our denial of him—all of us will see him.

Will this be the moment when we, like Christ, will transcend all our limitations? Is this the moment—though time no longer has meaning—when, as St. Paul foresees in the magnificent fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, God will be all in all?

Paul assures us in that chapter that “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Cor 15:22). What will it be like after all are made alive? What will we be like after there are no more powers working to thwart the loving purposes of God?

What does Paul mean, that God will be all in all?

Here we must bow humbly before the mystery and not pretend to know the answers. But we may still speculate, as Christians throughout the centuries have done.

From Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-395):

What, then, is the point the divine apostle is making in this text? That at some time evil will recede into nonbeing and then be completely eradicated and that God’s perfect goodness will enfold in itself every rational being, and nothing God has made will be cast out of his kingdom.

The Church’s Bible: 1 Corinthians, trans. by Judith L. Kovacs

Gregory of Nazianzus (330 – c. 389) reminds us of our human condition:

God will be “all in all” when we are no longer what we are now, a multiplicity of impulses and emotions, with little or nothing of God in us, but are fully like God, with room for God and God alone. This is the maturity toward which we speed.

Theological Oration 30.6, in On God and Christ:
The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. by Frederick J. Williams, Lionel R. Wickham

Is this glory only for the endtime?

Is it something we can forget about for now? How do we speed toward this maturity for which we are made, as Gregory of Nazianzus says?

We are not intended to sit by idly and wait for the fullness of history to come upon us. Here are a few suggestions as we wait for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ:

  Cultivate Mindfulness. Cultivate a stance of looking for God in all things, so that when the divine is revealed to us, we will be prepared to receive, and so that we may grow in the goodness and beauty God of throughout our life. We can practice gazing on God, as much as our present limitations and the abundant grace of God allow right now.

  Jesus has already prayed “that all may be one” (John 17). We can cooperate in that work of union by doing what we can to make divisions cease and by reminding ourselves of the beauty and goodness residing in ourselves and in each other.

  Pray to become the mercy, peace, and compassion of Christ in and for the world. We are created to be capable of God, capax dei. So we are also capable, through grace, of being Christ’s loving presence, Christ’s merciful presence, Christ’s peace-bringing presence.

  Pray that when people meet us, they will be meeting Christ. And if they forget who they meet, may it be ourselves they forget and not Christ.

“Jesus coming soon!” she said.  “Have a blessed day!”

With two hurricanes already having hit the state, and a third seeming to be on the way, one’s thoughts might indeed turn toward the Endtime.   Was the Second Coming imminent?  Should we put on white garments and go up to the mountain? Or since we have no mountains in Florida, should we at least repent in sackcloth and ashes? What about the various threats that may be facing us today?  Shouldn’t we be asking the same questions?

Jesus is indeed coming soon, but perhaps not yet as the Second Coming, of which we are told that we know neither the day nor the hour.

Our call, therefore, is not to go up on the mountain, but to be attentive. “Watch therefore,” Jesus tells us (Matthew 25:13). And we are to watch not only for the Second Coming, but for the coming of Christ in each moment of our lives.

We are to pay attention to how he draws near to us in the storms of life, in the moments of calm, in the people we meet, in the depths of our heart. He comes to us as Presence, and sometimes he comes in what we perceive as Absence. While Christ is always there whether or not we cry, “Come, Lord Jesus,” we may not notice unless we are alert.

Should we repent in sackcloth and ashes?

We can be assured that God does not take revenge on us by sending hurricanes (or earthquakes or disease or any other sorrow).  Nevertheless it is always appropriate to pray with the tax collector in the Gospel of Luke, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” We are continually being called to repentance — to metanoia — to that complete turning of our whole lives to God.

And here again, we are to be attentive, both to our constant need for mercy and to God’s free gift of the mercy we need. We walk through the day bathed in mercy.  We sleep wrapped in the tender mercy of God.  God’s mercy is there when the tree comes crashing through the roof and when the electricity goes out and when it comes back on.

God is not wreaking vengeance on us by the bad things that happen in our lives, but God does work in them – as in everything else – to draw us to the divine and, if we are willing, to make us more like the Christ for whom we wait.

The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
…

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

(Revelation 22:17, 20b)

A voice cries out:
‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’

Isaiah 40:3-5

What is the wilderness in my life where God desires to come and reveal the divine Presence?  And how am I to prepare a way?

Is this wilderness:

• an untamed part of myself?
• a place of emptiness or sadness in my heart?
• the city streets, where so many are suffering, and, just as in a wilderness, can find no food or shelter?
• an area of my life where I feel out of control?
• or perhaps a desert time without cell phone, computer, or other media?

O God,
You who always take the first steps toward me,
show me how to prepare the way and to welcome you.
May I be attentive,
so as to recognize your Coming in my own wilderness.
If there are roadblocks that I have put in the path,
even if I don’t yet see them for what they are,
I offer them you you for your divine purpose.
Amen.

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.

Luke 2:25-26

When my grandmother got married, she moved into the multi-generational household of her new husband’s family. This was not uncommon at the time, and it had its advantages and its disadvantages. One advantage was that my grandfather, Sam Lee, could continue to manage the family farm while at the same time practicing law in the small Alabama town nearby.

One distinct disadvantage was that my grandmother, Mattie, who became part of an extended family whose women would scarcely have been mistaken for shrinking violets, was never to be the mistress of her own home.

It turned out, however, that Sam Lee had serious heart disease; and since he had been advised to rest, Mattie began to make lunch for him at his office so that he was spared the trip home each midday. After lunch he would nap on a cot there. This was the closest, my grandmother told me, that they ever came to having their own place.

Now Sam Lee’s law office happened to be next to the county jail. After he died in 1935 at the age of fifty, Mattie received a letter. It was from one of the inmates at the jail, who wrote that he had been able to see into the office from his cell, and he could tell how happy they had been during these noontimes together. Far from feeling embarrassed at being more or less spied upon, my grandmother found great comfort in this letter. It was a confirmation of their love and a consolation in her grief.

Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
(Isaiah 40:1)

Advent teaches us, like Simeon, to look for the Christ where we might least expect to find him. The comfort of the One who comes may be manifested through unlikely events or through people we might tend to dismiss. Everything, in fact, holds the potential for encounter with the divine Comforter.

We must open our eyes and our hearts to the small child, to the inmate at the county jail – and also to the hungry, the naked, the ill, as Jesus teaches in Matthew 25. Not only is it true, as he says to us, that whatever we do to “the least of these who are members of my family” we do to Jesus, but we may also find God’s solace reaching out to us from these unexpected quarters. For Jesus himself was not what people expected of the promised Christ.

…he was despised, and we held him of no account.
(Isaiah 53:3)

Nothing in our lives – no person, no event –can be ruled out as a privileged meeting place with the always abiding Christ who is now and forever with us, until the end of time (Matthew 28:20).

During Advent, there are three ways in which we are called to be attentive to the coming of Christ – or as was said about Simeon, in which we are “looking forward to the consolation of Israel.”

• First, during the beginning of Advent especially, we look forward to the Second Coming of Christ.
• Second, as Christmas draws near, we anticipate the joy of Jesus’ birth.
• Third is mindfulness to God’s presence in the Christ who is always coming to us in often unexpected ways.

So be attentive, we are exhorted,

…or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.
And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.
(Matthew 25:36-37).

To return, however, to the opening verses of the Canto: these are St. Bernard’s prayer to the Blessed Virgin, a beautiful and adoring paean. There is one verse, though, which jars me. In spite of the sublimity of the poetry, I believe Dante is mistaken when he has Bernard say to Mary:

you are the one who so ennobled
human nature that the maker of it
condescended to be made of it.

It was not because Mary was so good that God became human, but because you and I were (and are) in such need — because so often we debase rather than ennoble our human nature. Jesus comes to us out of that “love which moves the sun and the other stars,” a love so encompassing that it freely enfolds us in our sinfulness and our brokenness.

At the end of the Paradiso the poet experiences his own desire and will “turned already, / like a wheel that is moved evenly, / by the love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

In our truest self, each one of us is also moved by this love. Let us pray that through Jesus, God-with-us, our whole being might be in harmony with the divine love.

O loving God,
may I wait in peace for you,
and waiting
enter the place in my heart
where like the sun and the stars
I am moved only by your love,
and there find you
already with me,
waiting for me.

 

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning.
(Psalm 130:5-6)

Come to this world so laden with sorrow,
dirtied with greed,
fractured by war and hate,
weighed down with anxiety.

Come to our hearts that sometimes long for you
and sometimes choose lesser things over your love.
Come to your beloved people
who don’t know how to receive you.

Come as you are to me,
into this murky heart that too often desires you
to come as someone you are not,
to your dim child who is not sure
to recognize you in your coming.
Brighten these eyes in your beauty, O Beauty,
and enliven the dullness of this mind, O lovely Truth.

Come, O come, Lord Jesus!

The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. …
The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

(Revelation 22:17, 20)

We might add another to the list this Advent season: a time for exhorting and a time for comforting.

As for the first, we might think of exhorting the troops to action and other urgings to scary or wearisome action. As for comforting — how we do need to be comforted and consoled!

But what if they were related—the comfort and the exhortation?

One of the beautiful Advent readings is taken from Isaiah 40, which begins, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.”

These words are spoken for a people in exile.  But what is this consolation? The exile is nearly over, they (and we) hear.  Your iniquities are pardoned. God is coming and “will feed his flock like a shepherd.”

When we turn to the New Testament, we hear Jesus also assure us of comfort.  In the Gospel of John he says that he will not leave us orphaned, but will send “another Comforter” (often translated “another Advocate”), indicating that although the Comforter to whom his followers are accustomed (that is, Jesus himself) will soon no longer be visibly present, they will continue to have the divine comfort of the Holy Spirit.

The Greek word used for Comforter is Paraklete, Παράκλητος.

But curiously enough the related word that is often used to mean “comfort” or “encouragement” in the New Testament — παράκλησις, paraklesis — can also mean “exhortation.”

Are they both the same? How can this be?

First, we are important enough to God that it matters how we are doing, whether we are heartened or discouraged: hence the encouragement and the comfort.

We are important enough to God that it matters how we live and how we love. Hence the exhortation.

We are important enough — small, weak, sinful creatures that we are — that God is willing to go to the greatest lengths to find us, console us, and exhort us.

God is merciful. When we fail, as we certainly will, God says, “Be consoled, be comforted, I am coming with might; I will gather you like a lamb in my arms and carry you home rejoicing.” (See Isaiah 40 and Luke 15:1-7.)

But comfort is not only for ourselves. So the comfort we receive is to share with others — hence the exhortation both to proclamation and to action. “Comfort my people.” For as we see in 2 Corinthians, the comfort brings with it its own exhortation.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
who comforts us in all our affliction,
so that we may be able to comfort those
who are in any affliction,
with the comfort with which
we ourselves are comforted by God.
For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings,
so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

2 Corinthians 1:3-5 (RSV)

• that there are about 118,000 vacancies for registered nurses in the United States;
• that the baby of a pregnant woman has died after his mother was kidnapped and set on fire;
• that soldiers in the army of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, had been known to eat the hearts of enemies they had killed;
• that the world food supply is dwindling.

Then I remember that on Christmas we are going to hear that the angels proclaimed, some 2000 years ago: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace.” We might well wonder what happened.

Standing boldly against the daily news reports is the testimony of some of our wise Christian thinkers and mystics, for example:

Josef Pieper (a 20th century follower of Saint Thomas Aquinas), writes in Happiness and Contemplation.

How splendid is water, a rose, a tree, an apple, a human face—such exclamations can scarcely be spoken without also giving tongue to an assent and affirmation which extends beyond the object praised and touches upon the origin of the universe. Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child’s face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment “seen” that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is—peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that “God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is.” [Plato, Laws, 715e.]

In the 14th century, Julian of Norwich hears the consoling and mysterious words:

Sin is behovely [fitting, useful], but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

And surpassing all other testimony is that of our own beloved Scriptures:

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. (Psalm 138:8)

Which is true?

Is the world an irredeemable mess where sin and sorrow are the ultimate truth?

Or is the promise of peace and goodwill on earth true? Can I believe that God will fulfill the divine purpose for me and that everything comes to its appointed goal?

We read in the gospel that the kingdom of God is among us. But we are also told to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God. We know that Jesus is here with us — and yet we still call out, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

The problem is that we live in the mystery of the already and the not yet; and this is so both in our own personal lives and in the world around us.

Nevertheless, I believe that at times God gives us the grace to glimpse the already through the not yet. We may glimpse it in terms of goodness, like the Cenacle co-founder Saint Therese Couderc — or as love, for example, or beauty, or the perfection of all things.

At the heart of things, all is in God’s hand. Christ has not only come but has died and is risen. God is sovereign; goodness triumphs.

Does this mean that we can ignore the evils we see around us? That we can say, for example, that since God is sovereign and goodness is triumphant, we don’t have to do anything about the state of our planet and our society? That we can concern ourselves with satisfying the ego, and let all else go?

Paul also struggled with this question: “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?”

He answers his own question: “By no means!” (Romans 6:1)

God’s plan does triumph, but just as we are called to be participants in the divine life, we also have a role in the divine mission. We pray for our own sinful and divided hearts to be purified. We work to end violence, injustice, poverty, homelessness, and pain. But we do not despair, either because of our own weakness and sinfulness or because of the state of the world, for once again, Jesus has come among us, has died and is risen. God has triumphed — in us as well as in creation as a whole.

We claim as our own the vision of Isaiah, who saw that:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid…
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
(Isaiah 11:6,9)