Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Advent 1 B - Sunday, November 29, 2020
Here we are, at the beginning of a new liturgical season and a new Church year, and I, for one, am bewildered. And Jesus wants me to keep awake? What?? I’m exhausted, and to be quite honest, constantly asking in my prayer: “Where are you who brought out of the Nile the shepherd of his flock?” Where are you, God???
I cry with the psalmist: “O God, why have you utterly cast us off? Why is your wrath so hot against the sheep of your pasture?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us and are so far from our cry and from the words of our distress?” “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” And you want me to be awake and alert? I am thankful that Scripture writers are not afraid to rage and lament and complain about God’s hiddenness. “How long will you hide yourself, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?”
This year more than ever, I need Advent, the season that emerges when the world as we know it has changed; when things are no longer as they used to be; when a cosmic shift has taken place. This year more than ever I need to enter the Christian New Year in lamentation. I find myself with no desire for Hallmark Season’s sentiments. I need the radical honesty of Scripture: "How long will you be angered despite the prayers of your people?" "because you hid yourself, we transgressed." I don’t feel like pretending that God’s apparent silence is just fine. I mean, let’s get real, our world is not okay. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, and I want God to tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains quake at God’s presence- as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil. That’s right, this Advent, I need to have permission to express the truth of my sorrow. Our culture of denial, apathy and hedonism is just not cutting it for me. I need God to show up. I need God to restore! I am human, and when we humans stand at the thresholds where our world is shaken, we just want someone to do something about it and make it all like it used to be. Just do something. I want to cry like the prophet Isaiah cries to God in the Hebrew Scripture lesson for this first Sunday of Advent: "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," God, will you please come down here and do something about this mess?
I, like Isaiah, have been calling for a God who will do "awesome deeds" like making mountains quake and the nations tremble:
- Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call; bring this pandemic to an end.
- Great is your compassion, O God, protect the most vulnerable.
- Do not let your compassion go unmoved and give strength to all healthcare workers.
- Lord have mercy on those who are unemployed.
- O Lord God of vengeance show yourself to all those corrupted politicians in Washington D.C.
- O Lord God of Hosts destroy systemic racism.
- Rise up, O Judge of the world; give every greedy corporation their just deserts, for they trust in great wealth and rely upon wickedness!
- Behold the affliction of your LGBTQ+ children, and deliver them from all ignorant evil doers who are full of hate!
- Protect this wounded planet before we completely destroy it past saving; then we will be like those who dream.
- Save us, O God, from ourselves!
If one thing I’ve learned from praying the psalms day in and day out, week after week, as we monks do, is that it is okay to pray these prayers. Our God is a great God and I really believe that these prayers are but a fraction of God’s own dream. And yet, I know I can’t just dwell in my rage and my lamentation because during Advent, God is calling us to transform our hearts for something else. As Saint Paul says in 1st Corinthians, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ." This is quite a challenge in a world that favors “press ‘enter’ and you’ll have it right now”; a world that favors end products, more than a process of transformation. Advent tells us that things worth waiting for come to be in the darkness. The Spirit of God hovered over the darkness of the deep waters, preparing to create the world. Next spring's seeds break open in the darkness of the winter soil. The child grows in the deep and nourishing darkness of the womb.
During Advent we prepare for God, and the God who will turn up is likely to be very different from the one we expect. Our God, whose Name is everlasting and whose renown endures from age to age, chooses a womb, and the equivalent of a hick town, and a brief life, and an agonizing death on a cross. Our God is a God who wants to be seen in the destitute, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner. This is not the kind of God we tend to expect, so orienting our hearts in that direction requires serious preparation. In order to be ready to receive God as God is and not as I, in my ignorance and weakness would have God to be, I need Advent.
So the Season of Advent has to do, not so much with where God is, and more to do with where we are. The work needs to begin not so much with what’s going on in the world, but with what’s going on in us. The truth is that we tend to see people, the world, and God, not as they are, but as we are. When I am anxious, the world is difficult, and I want to run away. When I am scared and paranoid, other people are after me and become threats. When I have a hard time loving myself and I’m filled with guilt, I may blame and judge others. When we wake up and become aware of what is going on inside of us, we don’t project it out onto other people, the world and God.
Christ came, Christ is with us, Christ will come again is all one in Kairos, God’s time- the time of the company of saints and of eternal life. Jesus’ exhortation to “beware” is better translated from the Greek as “to perceive,” and has everything to do with opening our eyes to the revelation of Christ’s presence here and now. It is this revelation of Christ that transforms our interior life and leads us from darkness to light, and from external appearances to deep insight and wisdom. It is through this revelation of Christ that we can orient our heart to find salvation in meaning instead of achievement, in quality instead of quantity, in being instead of doing, and in the power of the God within us that can turn all of life whole and good. After all, it is only through our own transformation that we can transform the world.
May we pray and be transformed in God’s time. May we orient our heart to Christ, who came, who is with us, and who will come again. And may we all have a blessed Season of Advent. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
Amen,
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