By Sister Karen M. Cavanagh, C.S.J.
It’s week two in Advent and we wonder, “Where is the time going?”
Last Sunday, Advent’s first, was during the Thanksgiving weekend and many of us were already tired. Were we able to hear, let alone absorb Scripture’s reminders that we often “wander away, harden our hearts and wither like leaves” in our attempts to follow Christ? Are we able to fully realize and understand the call and challenge to “Be watchful! Be alert! Stay awake!” as we hear it anew this year?
Today, and on the coming Sundays in December, we hear in the Scriptures God’s words of challenge, comfort, urgency, repentance, patience, promise, justice, new life, forgiveness and “God with us – Emmanuel.” We’re reminded to not dwell on how fast the time is going for with God “one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.” Every second, each breath and all things are new and only now.
The Church offers us in the readings a vast array of faces, places and spaces which help us to contemplate this Advent, and although they are from thousands of years ago, they are as formative today as ever. Why? Because we are never the same as yesterday, or last year, or when, as youngsters, we opened little windows of anticipation on our Advent calendars. We can and do know that the message is for each of us in the very places and spaces we inhabit right now.
Isaiah, Peter and John the Baptist are this day’s “faces.” The “places” are the desert, a highway in wastelands, the River Jordan and the whole Judean countryside. The “spaces” are in our hearts and in our day-to-day living. The landscapes keep changing.
Isaiah, who once complained to God, “Why me?” has received the prophetic call and been given divine fire to his tongue and his heart. He announces a new end to Israel’s Babylonian captivity. Their desert has once more been watered and an era of redemption is on the horizon. A voice (Isaiah’s) cries out, “Prepare the way … make straight a highway for our God … God’s glory will be revealed.” He announces, for them and for us, that God will gather us in strong and tender arms as we are carried to safety.
Ages later, this prophecy is fulfilled in another face – one different than we might expect. From the desert comes yet another fired in tongue and heart, dressed in animal skins and living on locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist is a man who is, seemingly, intoxicated with God and definitely on a mission. “Prepare a way … make straight your hearts and your lives and welcome the One mightier than I.”
In his letter, Peter alludes to a final return of Christ in glory. He gives us “in the meantime” advice: “Be eager to be found without spot or blemish and at peace.”
This coming for which we prepare is not Christ’s birth at Christmas. This we remember and celebrate each year. What we focus on as we prepare for that celebration is Christ’s everyday (now) desire to be manifested in our lives and in those ever-present spaces in which we find ourselves. Ours is a call to sincere repentance – to conducting ourselves in holy lives and to hastening the coming of Christ in the lives of others. We are called to smooth and soften the rough and hardened spaces in our hearts and in our relationships and responsibilities. We are called to be the image of Jesus Christ for our extremely close, our nearby and our far distant sisters and brothers.
Many of those close and those on the other side of the earth are in a desert of dryness, sorrow, illness, hunger and thirst, fear for tomorrow or even their lives. Others live in quiet desperation as they experience the losses of work, home, healthcare, independence or a faith that there is a God who hears their cries.
Not Deserted
The desert may feel different for each one of us but it makes us feel pretty much the same – isolated, frightened, alone and even abandoned. How do they – and we – wait in hope that God will find us there? How do we trust that, although we may be in a desert, we are not deserted? How do our words, prayers and actions toward our brothers or sisters announce that message to them?
In this Advent week, if we’re watchful, awake and alert, if we live in the now, if we look into our hearts and the message of those who have gone before us, we will meet, see, hear of, pray for, shake hands with, say “thank you” to, offer a seat or hand to, share our treasure with and lend comfort to another who may feel “parched, lifeless and without hope.”
Our word, gesture or presence may be the only Good News she or he hears this week. Our presence in another’s desert can change us. It can be a life-giving refreshment and renewal of trust in our own lives and in our own desert times. May it be so.
Readings for the Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40: 1-5, 9-11
Psalm 85: 9-10, 11-12, 13-14
2 Peter 3: 8-14
Mark 1: 1-8
Sister Karen M. Cavanagh, C.S.J., a trained spiritual director and retreat facilitator, is a pastoral associate/family minister at St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish, Jamaica.