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/

EYE-OPENER

I found the following passage in a weekly e-mail I get from the Church of St Matthias in Somerset, N.J., and found it inspiring enough to reproduce here. I hope people agree.

"Prayer is one of those words that needs revisioning. We tend to think of it as something we do, but it is much more something we are. When we live in union we are a prayer, and everything we do becomes conscious, willing, and free....To pray is to live consciously inside of God. That's all. Sanctity does not mean being pious or perfect, but doing for God's sake what you used to do for your own sake. That makes all the difference. It is the still point of the turning world and creates a different kind of human being whose centre is outside of himself or herself. These are the only people who are really free because they are free from themselves.
When we stop confusing holiness with morality and recognize that it has to do with transformed identity and a new centre point, we will have gone a long way toward understanding what is happening in prayer and what the true goal of spirituality actually is. Morality -- and transformed and mature responses -- will then follow as certainly as night from day."

Source: Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Radical Grace, July - September, 2002

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/

GOODNESS!

In the midst of Brexit, Trump, ISIS/Daech, and so forth, I found this snippet from St Matthias's Church website in Orange, N.J., entirely refreshing. One never tires of the Psalms.

"I believe I shall enjoy the Lord's goodness in the land of the living." Psalm 27:13

What a wonderful mantra the psalmist offers. Try repeating this belief statement as you go through a typical day. We most often see what we expect to see. Do you expect to see the Lord's goodness as you go through the day?  It takes many forms: a surprise phone call, a random act of kindness, some unexpected good news, or the daisy growing through the concrete. We are invited to one step further, however. After we see the Lord's goodness, we are challenged to enjoy it. That means slowing down to take notice. In this way, we are changed by what we see. Give yourself the gift of being transformed by the goodness of the Lord.

Source:  Loyola Press, May 4, 2016

NOT THE DEATH OF GOD

Samuel Palmer, "Coming from Evening Church" (ca. 1827)

A few nights ago I heard an interview with a highly intelligent and perceptive woman, Monique Hébrard, who has written on “Twelve Urgencies for the Church”. One of the urgencies, she said, was for the Church to recognise that “Christendom is dead”. Not God, not Christianity: Christendom. Referring to the recent massive demonstrations in France against gay marriage, she said that many of the demonstrators were simply “nostalgic for Christendom”: a time when the Church dictated its morality to society at large. When the interviewer asked, “So, it’s gone? Isn’t that sort of sad? Haven’t a lot of good things gone with it?” Hébrard replied, “Yes, sure. Lots of good things have gone. But what are we going to do? Cry? No: we’re going to live.” A sturdy answer. And I thought she was probably right.

Then today I was preparing for Christmas, around family, after discussing what we were going to do on Christmas Eve, and listening to one of my favourite ancient Christmas vinyls: the glorious Austrian soprano Maria Stader singing German Christmas songs. And I thought of the death of Christendom. The faithful go on being faithful, and find ways to live with the perfectly valid pagan aspects of Yuletide. Angry atheists carry on being Grinches, growling at the season in their lairs. But what is vanishing is the wave that carried some beauty, some thoughtfulness and even some prayer into the ordinary deserts of the year’s dark. Singing “Silent Night” and “O little town of Bethlehem” was never proselytism: it was a way for thousands to touch the hem of a garment.

And it made me think of an urgency different from Hébrard’s: with what are we going to replace “Christendom”? What is the Church going to do for the thousands who are not ready to become active members of the Party, so to speak? In French politics, the parties distinguish between “les militants”, the full card-carrying members, and “les sympathisants” who will probably vote for you at the next election but still maintain some distance. What I see in the mainstream Churches at the moment is a sense that nowadays you need to be “un militant”, and the more militant the better: to be a “sympathisant” is simply not good enough.

But what happened to the five thousand who were fed in Galilee? How many became apostles, enthusiasts, constantly at Temple or synagogue, founding and running charitable organisations to help widows and orphans? Ten per cent., probably. But the other 4500? Did they continue worshipping irregularly, keeping what commandments they could but not scrupulously, and yet – and yet with a new question always behind their eyes, a new presence filling their prayers when they least expected it?

This is what “Christendom” did. I remember it, as I was part of the generation that saw it turn. Many people went to church because, yes, they believed, but also because it was what they were used to and because it was a good thing to do on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know why it is,” said Squire Letterby in Charles Morgan’s Breeze of Morning, “but church and sherry always seem to go together.”

Not good enough, perhaps. But the Church is in danger here of an insidious hypocrisy. The standard justification for “a smaller, poorer Church”, as Pope Francis says he wants, is that people are leaving in droves anyway, and that the Church should respond to that by being both smaller and far more activist, involved in social action and evangelizing at every level. What this justification occludes is the fact that a tight, coherent, highly activist Church may in fact participate in the process it claims to observe: the death of Christendom. Such a Church may in fact be helping to kill what was left of Christendom.

In the Hébrard spirit, facing up to things is a Good Thing. In that case, the Church should perhaps face up to that uncomfortable possibility. Is it what is wanted? Is the ecclesiastical reaction to Christendom’s wasting illness to be simply “Good riddance”? Do we prefer 500 militants on their own to 500 militants plus 4500 people who come for mixed and sometimes unworthy reasons? Would such a reaction be consistent with the claimed evangelical spirit, or even with charity? Or would it be whisking away the garment’s hem from their touch?

What could be done to save that remnant of “Christendom”? The Church can’t get its authority over the secular world back. But part of its claimed evangelism could be a gentler conversation with the “Yes, I used to go, but it’s been so long” people; a listening to their reasons for not going, both the ones they give and the ones they don’t give; a less strident tone in the Church’s pronouncements on itself and the world; a little more attention to prayer and spirituality; a less continual emphasis on change; a great deal more beauty in the liturgy; a recognition that nostalgia is an aspect of human nature that God can love also, and not necessarily a form of sin; and that, contrary to a certain Gospel pronouncement, some old bottles hold new wine quite well.

The villagers in my part of France, even the elderly, have taken to the Vatican II Mass quite well. They like the cheerfulness, and shaking hands at the Peace. But out of 48 villages, each main Sunday Mass (there are 3 in all, a Saturday night and two Sunday) has about 40 people, who drive considerable distances. And I personally know a number of people who stay away yet who might have been retained; those for whom the new régime has neither loaves nor fishes. It seems a pity. 

ANGLICAN 'ACHE OF THE KNOWN'?

There are, I suspect, many Anglicans for whom Edward Noke's painting of Cockington Church reflects their inmost idea of what a church, indeed what the church, is and should remain. No amount of inner-city "diversity" and "outreach" can shake this. If we could face a new century and new conditions with this image in our hearts, and intelligent ways of adapting it without losing it in our minds, conservation and loss might be balanced in kindness. (The 'ache of the known' is, of course, the English translation of 'nostalgia'.)

Incidentally, the album is a fine example of English choral singing, with some splendid descants.