A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)

 

 

Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

BEYOND MOURNING

In Latin countries, and possibly in Eastern Europe also, it is demotically known as le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead. Chrysanthemums are put on graves freshly cleaned and full of photographs of the deceased. Officially, the Catholic churches, Roman, Orthodox and Anglican, refer to it as the Feast of the Souls of the Faithful Departed, or All Souls' Day. Its purpose was, and mostly still is, to pray for the souls of those who have left this life, to help them on their way, to assist them in Purgatory and to aid them in the progress of the purgation that will ready them for Heaven. There is something deeply comforting in this schema, which intellectuals may doubt but cannot disprove. How it can combine with the equally strong, and to many comforting, belief that the deceased loved ones watch over those of us still in the world is not clear; but we may perhaps reply with Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile, I believe because it is impossible, or with Christ, To the Father nothing is impossible.

There is nothing one can say about death that has not been said so many times before that it is commonplace. It is absolute: that bourn/ from which no traveller returns. (Except, of course, he whose love was stronger.) We are prevented from knowing what, if anything, takes place beyond the curtain. Also, it is usually accompanied with pain and grief, both sometimes excruciating. We can discuss it only in images; and there are two of those I have always found consoling. 

The first comes to one when one stands beside a waterfall. One sees a twig, perhaps, or a leaf, borne tranquilly upon the stream towards an edge of which it has no idea. Then it disappears into the crashing maelstrom of white foam and booming noise. And then, at the bottom, we see it surfacing, rather awkwardly at first, and continuing on its way downstream. So, in the days when the thought of death haunted and terrified me, my mantra was The river flows on below the falls.

The second image is that of the caterpillar, which (as far as we know) lives its laborious and earthbound life in complete ignorance of the glorious butterfly it will become when that stage of its living is finished. If we do not know what happens to us after death, it is perhaps because there is no need for us to know: it might ruin our caterpillarity if we did.

What we do know is that Love is stronger even than death. Not, now, in the sense that true lovers can face it together or remain true after the decease of one; no, in the sense that the One who was Himself true Love did not refuse that road, took it for our sake, and emerged on the other side, first to broil fish on a lake beach and to invite his stupefied mourning friends to breakfast, and finally to precede us to his, and our, Father's house. 

The thought that by the time we die we are not perhaps exactly ready for that new house, that our wedding garment in rumpled, stained, a little torn and in serious need of a hot iron, should make us deeply thankful for the doctrine of Purgatory. We are told that our stay there will be hard work and not always agreeable; but there is light and warmth and welcome at the end. Our love and assistance should go to those who are already there and whom our support will hearten in their tasks; our pity should be reserved for those who have made themselves incapable of even desiring God's love and to whom, as C.S. Lewis wrote, His presence in æternitatem would be torture. They dwell in outer darkness, capable of receiving only that final mercy of His absence.  

Will they do so forever? Is the 'gnashing of teeth' eternal? Theologians from Origen on have doubted, even as stern moralists have insisted. The word to remember in this context is apokatastasis or "restoration": the idea that at the end of time everything will be "restored" to its original state -- and the original state of man, of course, was sinless. Some theologians have even extended apokatastasis to Lucifer and his fallen angels, maintaining that eventually the whole of Creation will be "saved" -- restored to a harmonious and loving relationship to its Creator. 

In the meantime, let us remember those who have preceded us, let us send them the loving thoughts and prayers that they will surely welcome. 

NOT THE WILL TO POWER

Orthodox icon: Christ and Moses

In his meditation on the perfect all-purpose prayer, I imagine Yeshua, having hallowed the Name (Baruch HaShem) and expressed hope for the coming of the malkut, the kingship, the Reign, now turning to the Divine Will. This flowed naturally from its predecessor: if a king reigns, his subjects do his will. What is God’s will? The Hebrew ratzon, when linked to the Deity, leads one directly to the Torah: God’s Will for Israel – and, eventually, for humanity – is that they keep his commandments, his statues, his testimonies. By itself the prayer that this be done is large and seems adequate for a Divine instruction; but Yeshua here added “on earth as it is in heaven” (ba’arets ka’asher na’asah vashamayim). In a sense this multiplies it: we pray that His will may be done on earth, not imperfectly in our usual sloppy human way, but the way it is done in Heaven, in His own presence, where the Reign is eternal and accomplished. There, we may imagine, His will is naturally done; and since His nature is Love, the natural doing of His will is a permanent activity of love, involving all the inhabitants of Heaven. Although we cannot equal this, we can strive for it.

Whether, when he composed the prayer, he already knew it or not, Yeshua was (to be) the new Torah: the divine commandments became two, then eventually one: first, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves; then, simply, to love and follow Yeshua Meshiach in everything.

 For earthling humans, though, questions remain. If we are to help bring about that Reign where his Will is done, we nevertheless ask ourselves, on almost a daily basis, what God’s will is. In this or that situation, hypothetical, actual or urgent, what should A do? Similarly, and sometimes even more anguishingly, what, in all that happens, does so by God’s will? If we say to someone “I’ll see you next month, Deo volente”, what does that imply?

It is comforting for us to remember that Yeshua himself faced this problem. When, in Gethsemane, he prays that the bitter cup he faces may be taken from him, he ends, “Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt”. In that case at least, the Father’s will was clear: the Son’s sacrifice had to be carried through to the end.

We are often, and rightly, taught not to confuse our desire with God’s will. Even in an apparently good cause, Deus vult is more often than not a projection and thus an error. Sometimes an attitude of suspicion, particularly toward ourselves, is salutary. On the other hand, neither should we fall into the trap of assuming the Divine will always to be the opposite of our own. It is independent of us, and of our desire. How to discern it, then?

I think that the best way is to remember the nature of the God who wills. His nature is Love. Whatever is congruent with Love at its highest may safely be considered congruent with His will. Which brings us back to the conflation of commandments in the new Alliance: 10 > 2 > 1. The eu-angelion, the authoritative good message, is precisely that: that doing God’s will is no longer a matter of memorising and following detailed rules, but of being definitively touched by the absolute, sacrificial Love of the Anointed One, and transforming one’s heart, mind and life accordingly. We are still stumbling earthlings, and will never do it as completely or as elegantly as the angels: but that, we may be assured, will be taken into account.

Once we have been touched by that Love, all we really need to do is (as I wrote before) to keep our shutters, our windows, and our doors wide open to the grace that is poured upon us unceasingly: Grace Abounding. It will fill us gradually, until perhaps one day, like Myriam Yeshua’s Mother, we will be gratia plena.

OF HOMESICKNESS AND GOING HOME

Crucifix in the St Crucifix Chapel, Cordes-sur-Ciel, France (sculptor unknown)

This morning – Trinity 3 for us Anglicans, 11^th of Ordinary Time for modern RCs – the second reading was from 2 Corinthians 5:  
“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. Yet whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him. For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”

When I saw this I wondered what our little Algerian priest would say about it; and I couldn’t help wondering also about its relation to Luther and sola fide. However, what he said was surprising and, I thought, rather marvellous. “Don’t think, he said, “that ‘standing before Christ to be judged’ is like the courtroom of the Assizes.” And he pointed to the huge and fascinating 17C crucifix after which the chapel we were in was named (see above). “When you stand before him,” he said, “you stand before Love Himself. And it is not he who will judge you. It is your own heart that will judge you, in the face and in the presence of that love.”

I found this a powerful and extraordinary thought. It was, of course, neither his nor new: in the Orthodox faith it is common, and it was uttered in a slightly different way by both St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great. In one sense, it is a comforting thought: as Sergei Komarov puts it, “no one is going to be dragged anywhere like a caught thief.” And Gregory Narekatsi, the Armenian poet, wrote “Isn’t God’s judgement still a meeting with God?/ Where will the Judgement be? I’m going there!” Yet the thought of our standing – you, I, us chickens just as we are – before the Son of God himself, with his eyes of absolute love upon us, is both pure joy and real terror. Even the most faithful and loving among us know that they are going to need a great deal of mercy at that moment.

The greatest thoughts I have read about the Last Judgement are those of C.S. Lewis, scattered about his writings. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” Moreover, he says somewhere else, Hell is not fire and brimstone: it is cold and dark. Why? Because Heaven is the continual presence of God in light and warmth. But some there are to whom that would be unbearable. For them God has, in his mercy, left a place where they can live Eternity far away from him. It is cold, dark and dreary, but that is all they have made themselves capable of.

This is entirely compatible with the idea of our own heart’s judging us in Christ’s presence. And it should give us furiously to think.

A TWO-LETTER WORD

Thinking about the infinite depth and variety that is the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the two appearances in it of the word “as”.

‘Thy will be done, on earth AS it is in Heaven’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses (or: debts) AS we forgive them that trespass against us’.

Extraordinary. I’ve written earlier about the curious use of the optative in the Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions; and the AS brings home the full mysteriousness. Let God’s will be done here on earth; let us help God’s will be done here on earth; let us do God’s will here on earth; but how? ‘AS it is [done] in Heaven.’

Thinking about this makes one realise that AS can have two different if related meanings: ‘to the same extent’ and ‘in the same manner’. Which is meant here? Possibly both; but it can surely never be done here, on grubby old Earth, to the extent that it is done in Heaven? So we are forced back to ‘in the same way’. And the question that arises at once is: how do we know the way God’s will is done in Heaven? We can only know this by various forms of extrapolation.

The first is by extrapolation from Earth, and us, in all our incompleteness, spoiltness (in every sense), and bloody mess. Without fantasising, we do I think rightly assume Heaven to be the opposite of those conditions. So when we look at the way God’s will tends to be ‘done’ at all here, we can look at that doing’s incompleteness, its spoiltness (in every sense) and its bloody mess, and weep. The bloody mess is that of those who assume God’s will to be the massacre of all they consider as His enemies. The spoiltness is that of those who assume God’s will to be their own comfort and prosperity, and/or those who spoil and deform other’s attempts to do God’s will out of anger, envy or cynicism. The incompleteness is that of all of us, who invariably ‘leave undone that which we ought to have done, and do those things which we ought not to have done.’

Battlefield of Verdun, 1916

The beauty is that God has given us the gift of imagination. Although we cannot reach perfection, we can imagine it. Although by our own efforts and on earth we cannot reach Heaven, we can imagine it. As Keats wrote in a letter: ‘I believe in . . . the truth of imagination. The imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it true.’ If the imagination is joined to the humility of prayer, it may help to save us.

So if – knowing that we cannot accomplish anything by our own efforts – we consider doing God’s will AS it is in Heaven, we know that such a doing is complete, unspoilt and clean. We also know that we can’t do that. Hence, perhaps, the optative, with its deliberate ambiguity and passive voice. ‘Let (or: may) thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.’ By whom? Not by us, messy little sinners that we are. Not directly by God himself: he doesn’t work that way much as we’d like him to. No: if it gets done, it will be done only by him, through us. And if so, we should work at learning two things: opening our doors, windows and shutters to let the ruach, the pneuma, the spiritus sanctus in; and constantly imagining Heaven.

Heaven imagined: Carlo Carloni

There is of course another help we have: the one who taught us the prayer in the first place. He is the Law; we do God’s will by following him. The two ways are not contradictory; but following Yeshua Meshiach is full of contradictions, as anyone who has closely read the Gospels knows. WWJD never has an easy answer. So the first way I suggested may complement the second. Prayer is, in any case, the one constant essential.

I will write my next post on the second AS in the Lord’s Prayer. Stay tuned.

HAPPY NEW YEAR?

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one.

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

   Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there.

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed.

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.
 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/