Advent IC • 3 December 2006
We have once again turned the corner, finished up one liturgical year and moved onto the next one. This never-ending cycle is made manifest to me by the ever-growing collection of black three-ring binders in which the sermons for a liturgical year reside. There’s less and less free space on the bookshelf as the years add up!
Even though Advent comes at that time of year when we have less and less daylight, the days are cold and (maybe! someday soon) snowy, a time of year that in this part of the world can be challenging for its lack of warmth and light, many people love this short season. Some, including myself, are militant ‘Adventists,’ that is, doing our utmost to linger in this in-between time of waiting, rather than jump into the commercial fray that so many call Christmas. Burlington yesterday was an absolute zoo and even the simple errand I needed to run was overwhelming for the sheer number of people doing their Christmas shopping. I have decided that surely one of Dante’s circles of Purgatory is being stuck for 15 minutes in a hotel/airport van listening to popular renditions of Christmas jingles as I was last month in Chicago. Those of us ‘Adventist’ die-hards have a hard time stemming the inexorable and ever-earlier tide of Christmas. Christmas comes soon enough for me on the 25th of December.
Why do others and I love Advent? There are many reasons. Partly because it is a forward and backward-looking time of year. It looks to the past in the sense that it is a recapitulation of the longing with which women and men of faith living in a bygone era anticipated the coming of God’s Messiah. But Advent also looks to the future in an attitude of expectancy over what God has yet to do in the life of humankind.
Advent’s face toward the past is usually the one we seek. How very wonderful that a gracious God broke in upon the life of humankind through the birth of Jesus, God’s very own Son! But Advent’s face to the future is one that also deserves our attention. The coming of the infant Christ to Bethlehem for all of its miraculous grace is but hint and suggestion of the Second Advent when Jesus, now Risen Saviour, will return to claim the world that is his.
Advent is also a season of paradoxes. The paradox of the exuberant flowers (with those wonderful tropic red flowers and green fronds) in front of the high altar left from the glorious ordinations that took place here on Wednesday, contrasted with the luxurious blues of Advent, serve as a visual reminder of God’s promises of life springing forth in the desert and humankind being made new through the most fragile form, an infant.
Joan Chittister, a Benedictine, points out another paradox of Advent:
Advent is about the spirituality of emptiness, of enough-ness, of stripped-down fullness of soul. Advent points to the essentials of life; commercial Christmas points to its superfluities.
The two great liturgical seasons of the church year, Advent and Lent, are about very different things. Advent is not ‘a little Lent.’ Advent is not a penitential period. Advent comes to trigger consciousness, not to provoke our consciences.
The Talmud teaches that every person should wear a jacket with two pockets. In the one pocket, the rabbis say, there should be a note that reads, ‘I am a worm and not completely human.’ And in the second pocket, the rabbis say, the note must read, ‘For me the universe was made.’
The story is clear: The function of Lent is to remind us who we are — and who we are not. The function of Advent, on the other hand, is to remind us who God is and who we are meant to be, as well. Advent is about the riches of emptiness.
The Jesus ‘who did not cling to being God,’ but is like us in all things, models what most of us take the greater part of our lives to learn: how to ‘be ourselves.’ The divinity who comes to us as an infant is the paradigm of what it means to learn from life as we grow into who and what we're meant to be. The God who comes without retinue or riches is the metaphor of a humility that requires us to remember how really small we are in the universe — and to come to the point where that is enough for us.
Advent is about the power of emptiness and the spiritual meaning of smallness.
When we have little to begin with, we have even less to lose. … We become full of possibility.
When we know who we really are, when we present no disguises and parade no pretensions, when we are honest both with ourselves and with others, we fired ourselves free to be ourselves. We have no image to keep up, no lies to gild in a gilded society. We become full of integrity.
When we learn to live with the basics rather than to hoard what does not belong to us, we can never be made bereft by the loss of life’s little baubles because we never depended on them in the first place. We become full of contentment.
When we recognize our own limitations, we need never fear failure. Then we can’t possibly be destroyed by losing because we never anointed ourselves entitled to win. We become full of confidence.
Finally, when Advent seeps into our souls, we come to understand that small is not nothing and empty is not bereft. To be small is to need, to depend on the other. Smallness bonds us to the rest of the human race and frees us from the arrogant isolation that kills both the body and the soul. To be empty is to be available inside to attend to something other than the self. We become full of the blessings of life.
Then, emptied out by the awareness of our own smallness, we may have the heart to identify with those whose emptiness, whose poverty of spirit and paucity of life is involuntary. Then, we may be able to become full human beings ourselves, full of compassion and full of consciousness.
An Advent spent in serious reflection on the power of emptiness and the meaning of smallness puts everything else in perspective. (1)
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I invite you during this oh-too short season of Advent to explore the paradoxes in your life: where things that are small are actually large; where nothingness actually is everything; where weakness is strength; where sorrow is joy; where dying to what was is being born into what may be; what seems right that might need changing.
The prophets often say that if you are content with your world as it is, you will not welcome the One who comes to change it. In Advent we wait for the birth anew of the One who wants to change our lives, the One who dreams of a new creation.
END NOTE
(c) The National Catholic Reporter, 2003
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