Advent Meditation, Week 4, 12/22/13

Isaiah 7:10-11,14--

"The LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying: 

Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God; 

let it be deep as the netherworld, or high as the sky!

...Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign: 

the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, 

and shall name him Emmanuel."

Matthew 1:18-24--

"Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the holy Spirit.  Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.

Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of The Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.  She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means “God is with us.”

When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home."

Romans 1:1-2--

"Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised previously through his prophets in the holy scriptures."

So, here we are--God-with-us, a time of signs, dreams and promises. The maiden betrothed becomes Virgin Mother becomes God-Bearer, Theotokos.  The Maker of the story writes his place into the story, altering not the story's logic (God always loves us), but the trajectory of events, so that all of Creation will be restored--the vision of Paradise as the place where God might walk with all His creatures in the cool of the afternoon.  This sort of reunion is not a third-party affair.  The Creator becomes the creature.  God chooses to live the drama, so that nothing is abandoned.  As Pope Francis said in his recent Wednesday audience, "Jesus is consubstantial with God, the Father, but also consubstantial with his mother, a woman."  

Has the mystery of the Incarnation become so trite to us that we lose sight of its arrival and too-quick passing?  Why meditate on the mystery of Emmanuel?  Two reasons:  one is personal and experiential and the other is, naturally, theological.  Perhaps it states the obvious to suggest that a hope for a worthwhile answer to the question involves something which must unite the two.  

There are certainly enough things that we can't fail to pay the dues on:  our spouses, children and grand-children; earning our pay and dealing as best we can with our domestic management; work issues and personal advancement as we try to follow our calling; political and social concerns that we follow because they make us fret over the future.  For those of us who teach or manage in schools, as I was reminded when I looked back at what I wrote last year when the violence at Newtown was fresh in our minds, there are other cares that darken the atmosphere and weigh on us, and these seem to recur with unpleasant regularity these days.

Others have felt the busy-ness, weariness and preoccupation that often erode our lives, from the ancient existentialist of Ecclesiastes to the poet Hopkins.  First our friend Qoheleth:  

"Again I saw under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant, nor a livelihood by the wise, nor riches by the shrewd, nor favor by the experts; for a time of misfortune comes to all alike. Human beings no more know their own time than fish taken in the fatal net or birds trapped in the snare; like these, mortals are caught when an evil time suddenly falls upon them." (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12)

Then we have Gerard Manley Hopkins, the quiet scholar-convert and Jesuit, a career Latin   teacher whose notebooks revealed riches of language and insight that place his poetry in the highest esteem.  First from “God’s Grandeur:” 

    "Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod."

And from the difficult “Carrion Comfort:”

"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee."

That we suffer anxiety and frustration does not make us different; it places us in the long procession of humanity whose company Jesus specifically joined, and meant to.  

There are many ways to be among those whom Jesus called "the poor" and for whom the prophets were advocates, as "the widow, the orphan and the stranger at the gate."  Even those born into privilege are challenged--and it maybe harder for these--to find God-with-us.  Ahaz, king of the Southern Kingdom of the fatally divided Israel, is challenged by Isaiah to dream an outside-the-box kind of dream, a new hope for his reign.  Judah is threatened, and he lacks the imagination to rally his own people because he trusts in conventional alliances with perfidious neighbors.  So Isaiah, inspired, dreams for him, a vision of the true power of God making its silent, graceful entrance into some obscure backwater of the old kingdom--a birth that will make the concerns of Ahaz and all who think that nothing ever changes quite irrelevant.  

But the acts God do not just address the concerns of rulers.  A young couple, Mary and Joseph, also received the Word, announced by the Angel and realized by the Spirit and power of God.  Each in a unique way said yes to something that was truly outside the normal expectation.  How their affirmations must have changed things for them!  Mary’s life might have might have taken some very unfortunate turns, had her family and neighbors seen in her only a possibly promiscuous young woman, now with an unexpected and “marked” child.  Joseph could have been the stern young carpenter resting on his legal and social station, had he made the fateful decision to “expose” Mary to the Law.  But they held their Messianic secret closely, and walked the path of their own covenant to raise this child.  The dreams they dreamt truly reached to the 

netherworld--and beyond.

How is our response to God-with-us to be evaluated in this personal-theological light?  Do we move in the closed circles of our own narrow expectations, limited by today’s weighty concerns?  Do we instead dream Isaiah’s dreams, or Mary’s, or Joseph’s?  Do we fear to jeopardize our quotidian safety-net?  Or, does our path invite the greatness of the Love that came to the Holy Family, with all its risks? Saint Paul, with the persuasion of the deep transformation that began on his “road to Damascus” where he would meet the infant Church, chose to be “all in” with a new mission and a new identity--a “slave of Christ Jesus called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God.”  We understand that he could have done otherwise.  

We will, whether we partake in the event or not, ultimately be part of the great events that our doctrine of the dynamic, loving God and God’s entry into our personal and cosmic history affirms.  The glory of Christmas is not only that God is with us--that much is given.  It is what will happen when we meet God-with-us.  We will meet Emmanuel, and we do meet Emmanuel.  As Hopkins says, “Christ plays in ten thousand places.”  Will our dreams be great enough so that we can say yes, I will play too?

Prepare well; open your hearts; have a blessed Christmas!

Advent Meditation, Week 3, 12/15/13

James 5:8-10--
You too must be patient.
Make your hearts firm,
because the coming of the Lord is at hand….
Take as an example of hardship and patience, brothers and sisters,
the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.

Isaiah 35: 5--
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened… 

Psalm 146: 7--
The LORD gives sight to the blind.

Matthew 11:2-6--
When John the Baptist heard in prison of the works of the Christ,
he sent his disciples to Jesus with this question,
“Are you the one who is to come,
or should we look for another?”
Jesus said to them in reply,
“Go and tell John what you hear and see:
the blind regain their sight,
the lame walk,
lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead are raised,
and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.
And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

Three of the four readings from the Third Sunday of Advent make their centerpiece a powerful metaphor in literature and religion, blindness.  For our purposes, the healing of blindness is one of the amazements of God's promised reformation of the cosmic order.  All manner of healing will take place:  from the restoration of our wounded bodies as we live to the raising to new life of our mortal bodies at the end of time, to the restoring of nature itself, a new heavens and new earth. 

The first basis of faith is to find a way to be open to the literal value of the hope of Salvation working in the world, God-with-us one hundred percent.  Christians do not believe that their story is a metaphor, not even a good one.  The essential mystery of the Incarnation, affirmed in each Sunday’s recitation of the Creed, is that God showed up and walked among us, doing every last little thing that we have to do to get through a human life, however long or short, and transported our human nature to Heaven.  True, Jesus did not sin.  But sin is by definition something that  none of us HAS to do, so Jesus’ not sinning is not a disqualification from his dual nature as True God and True Man.  The story of Salvation is, as Tolkein and Lewis would put it, a fact--the one True Story.

John the Baptist, from his prison cell, expresses a doubt:  “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?"  Momentarily, at least, he seems blinded and needing to look for some assurance from Jesus.  This Gospel reading is from a portion of Matthew that is full of quarreling. There is uncertainty, resistance and the beginnings of dissonance as his followers and other parties begin to awaken to the implications of His call. Jesus is about change, metanoia, “motion of mind and heart.”  As much as we might hope to see the truth about our need for renewal, doing so may be uncomfortable. 

The extreme, even exaggerated case of quacking before truth is alluded to in the Gospel passage. John’s plea comes from the prison cell where he has been placed for his humiliating criticism of Herod the Tetrarch, a petty despot of shameless concupiscence who had adopted the worst behaviors of the Greco-Roman aristocracy and recognized no boundaries of filiation in the exercise of his lust.  John had, as we know, called Herod out for his public adultery with his brother’s wife. John was imprisoned--probably in the vain hope that he would recant his accusation.  Ultimately John would be killed when Herod was backed into a corner by his equally impudent paramour who used her daughter to beguile the drooling Herod into handing over John’s head.  In the test of real manly character here, John wins hands down.  No one is more blind to the truth of his own acts than Herod.  His continued blindness when faced with Jesus, who would also be brought to his seat of judgment, is foreshadowed here, also. 

We have to hope that we can avoid being Herod.  The first step out of blindness is to affirm that God works in us and with us. Our job is to form ourselves, our wills, our relationships, and our world according to the messianic vision in its fulness. Jesus reminds John about these messianic signs.  The readings of all the weeks of Advent provide us with images of what God wants for us, and will bring to fruition in us if we allow God’s grace and power to work. 

But we have to know ourselves and we have to know God by knowing God-with-us.  St. Augustine, author of the first self-conscious spiritual autobiography in Christian history, wrote a poem-prayer whose first line is “Domine Iesu, noverim me, noverim te,”  “Lord Jesus, let me know myself, let me know you.”  The only way to get it right is to see ourselves in all honesty as we are, and as we are illuminated by God’s “kindly light.”  This is frightening to many, of course, for we all have a little bit of the stupid, gullible Herod in us.  Truth intimidates us.  At the same time, the Gospel truth is that we are the beings that God reaches for and suffers to save. 

The mission of Jesus is to bring to reality the prophetic vision of our restoration to wholeness within Creation and at the same time to guide us to wholeness of soul.  Our danger is that we will dismiss the literal reality of God’s full self-disclosure through the human Jesus because we hesitate to meet the life of God that exists within our own person.  Perhaps this realization is  part of what led John to ask his question--can this be true?  Isn’t it easier to wait?  Won’t we be let down if we commit with the fullness of our hearts and souls to the Kingdom that is at hand?  Having already made his very complete and dramatic witness, John experiences that sour note.  We don’t hear the rest of John’s story except second-hand, so we don’t know if he hears and accepts Jesus’ answer before his untimely death. It’s up to us to answer for ourselves.

The dramatic element in this story is Jesus’ challenge to John the Baptist:  Open your eyes in order to believe.  The truth has arrived. We must, as the wise elder James offers, “be patient” with ourselves, yet “make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.”  In so doing, we also prepare to greet the Christ-child, who would be with us, grow with us, walk with us and love us with all of God’s being. 

A blessed third week of Advent!

Advent Meditation, Week 2, 12/8/13

Matthew 3: 7-9--

When he [John the Baptist] saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees

coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers!

Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.

And do not presume to say to yourselves,

‘We have Abraham as our father.’

For I tell you,

God can raise up children to Abraham from these STONES.”

Romans 15:5,7--

May the God of endurance and encouragement

grant you to think in harmony with one another…

Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you,

for the glory of God.

Psalm 72:1-2

O God, with your judgment endow the king,

and with your justice, the king’s son;

he shall govern your people with justice

and your afflicted ones with judgment.

Isaiah 11:5-8

Justice shall be the band around his waist,

and faithfulness a belt upon his hips.

Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

the calf and the young lion shall browse together,

with a little child to guide them.

The cow and the bear shall be neighbors,

together their young shall rest;

the lion shall eat hay like the ox.

The baby shall play by the cobra’s den,

and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.

"Peace be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things."

Next week the Advent readings will begin the True Story of the Savior's birth, thereby introducing the yearly telling of the Drama of Salvation that focuses the cycle of the Sunday readings.  Today belongs to John the Baptist. Urgency and dissonance again turn up in the readings for the week, especially the Gospel.  Matthew ties the Old Regime with the New in the person of the Baptist.  So this part of his Gospel just as easily belongs to the ancient law of piety and justice as to the joyful post-Resurrection awareness that illuminates the Gospel as a whole.

So John the Baptist is the last in the line of the Prophets, and he meets the standard.  He is inspired by God to speak difficult truth to those whom the people fear. The Men of the law and the men of the Temple wield both worldly influence and religious self-righteousness in first-century Palestine.  They feel no compulsion to be nice about it.  Nor do they feel compunction about what was apparently a shameless level of hypocrisy, so for show they come to the Baptizer who proclaims the prophetic message of metanoia:  change your mind and change your heart, for God is near and God's judgment is upon all.  John's swift condemnation of these characters exhibits not only the pure model of the Biblical prophet, but the gift of discerning the truth of human character, that which the rest of us hope and think is not so visible.  John has risked everything for God; he is formed in the fierce and lonely Judean wilderness, has felt the Hand of God clutch his innermost being, and has surrendered to Yahweh.  His recompense is to see his world and its justice as Yahweh does.  He knows with the mind of God where the poor stand and where the Pharisees and Sadducees stand.

John the Baptist proclaims a standard not one of us can meet.  As described by St. Paul, "all of us have sinned and fallen short of God's glory."  It is the truth.  We SHOULD fear God's gaze.  All the prophets proclaim judgment.  But the same Mind of God that caused each of them to wince at the ability of the human soul to harbor a thousand faces of genuine ugliness also teaches a truth that is even harder to see:  that God's Covenant Promise stands strong still.  Even in the old regime Isaiah contemplated a vision of a world not only healed but brought to an impossible goodness.  Isaiah's metaphor is powerful, but it is the exact counterpoint to John's "brood of vipers"--"The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair."  God fashions a regime that is safe for those who will risk the return to original innocence and original justice.  This is the true and only metanoia.

Hence, Jesus comes and will come to teach the knowing and the living of the reign of God.  Both John the Baptist and Jesus preach the At-Hand-ness of God's work around us and in us.  It's appropriate for Paul to wish the saints of the ancestral Church, "May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another."  If we don't know and admit human sinfulness, we don't know much by anyone's standard.  At the same time that each of us ACTS the Pharisee, each of us is also called to LIVE the welcoming, harmony, gentleness and transforming charity of Emanuel, God-with-us and God-who-will-be-with-us.

A blessed Second Week!

Advent Meditation, Week 1, 12/1/13

Isaiah 2:4--

He shall judge between the nations,

and impose terms on many peoples.

They will hammer their swords into plowshares

and their spears into sickles;

one nation shall not raise the sword against another,

nor shall they train for war again.

Psalm 122:8-9--

For the love of my brothers and friends

I will say, “Peace be within you!”

For the love of the house of the LORD, our God,

I will pray for your good.

Romans 13:13--

Let us then throw off the works of darkness

and put on the armor of light;

let us live decently as in the light of day,

not in orgies and drunkenness,

not in promiscuity and lust,

not in rivalry and jealousy.

Matthew 24:43-44--

Be sure of this: if the master of the house

had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,

he would have stayed awake

and not let his house be broken into.

So too, you also must be prepared,

for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.

It’s about Time!  Is it good to speak about time when you’re late?  The Advent First Sunday readings for this year have a rude urgency to them: tension, conflict, dissonance, change, beating the swords, throwing off works of darkness, breaking into the house.  And for those of us who work in schools--aren't we anxious and conflicted enough already, especially now?  This isn’t relaxing at all.

For that matter, nor is the Gospel; nor the reign of God as lived at the heart of the Church through the centuries by the Proper Saints and the ordinary saints.  Saint Paul really is emphatic about the conversion he wants to see in the community of the Church, making its way as Christ’s witness in pagan Rome, not only in contrast to the saturnalian character of life in the empire, but in its own internal being--throwing off rivalry and jealousy, which have not gone out of style among believers like ourselves.  Maybe we can be smug about having grown out of the “worldly” temptations he names, but today dissension within the Body of Christ continues to be the thousand cuts which cripple the Body.  None of us needs to look far to see it; it is in every family, workplace and political body, the embodiment of Augustine’s City of Man.

Isaiah’s passage is eerily “modern” in its sensibility as well, warning us not to accept the world’s “training for war” by its standards--games of intrigue, the manipulation of proxies, the inaction of international agencies, the weapons trade and the persistence of ideology continue to simmer even as real progress continues on the dismantling the Cold War arms repositories.  The state of the world is not at peace, and won't be, until human hearts are readied for genuine hospitality, the ability to say with the Psalmist, "Peace be within you," and to pray for one another's good and mean it.  I am reminded of some family members of my grandparents' generation, now long deceased, who bore a grievance that separated them quite senselessly for more than thirty years.  Finally one showed up--completely unexpectedly--to restore the relationship.  You know what everyone said:  "It's about time!"

All of us know innately that things work toward natural conclusions--or better, resolutions.  Some of these are more satisfactory than others. Why?  Taking a cue from the New Testament readings, we might be able to propose a couple of reasons.  The first is awareness:  "if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake."  The Socratic version of this is Nosce te ipsum, Gnothi seauton, "Know Thyself" or, better still, Know Your Human Nature And Its Destiny, which might be close to what the old Stoics would say.  Jesus, for his part, is discussing our destiny as individuals and the destiny of all persons as part of the order of Creation and Redemption. 

The old Catechism told us that we were made to know, love and serve God in this life and be happy with Him in the next.  Our job is not to be distracted from the long-term view.  There are some basics we need to attend to now--"throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light."  So, maybe the second reason why things conclude themselves either ambiguously or awkwardly in human affairs is that we fear being light, especially to ourselves.  Those dark rooms, stuffy closets and cluttered corners in the mansions of our souls keep us tied down by a skulking, earthbound gravity and make us unable and often unwilling to surrender freely to Grace, the armor of light. 

Advent must be about advancing the judgment to which all must eventually submit.  When we were told as little children to make room for the Baby Jesus in our hearts, the metaphor was not just for our child selves.  Isn't it about time for some house-cleaning?

Advent 2012 Week 4

All things great and small--and looking ahead.

"But you (Bethlehem) Ephrathah, the least of the clans of Judah, from you will come for me a future ruler of Israel whose origins go back to the distant past, to the days of old....
He will take his stand and he will shepherd them with the power of Yahweh, with the majesty of the name of his God, and they will be secure, for his greatness will extend henceforth to the most distant parts of the country." Micah 5: 1-4.

"He says first You did not want what the Law lays down as the things to be offered, that is: the sacrifices, the cereal offerings, the burnt offerings and the sacrifices for sin, and you took no pleasure in them; and then he says: Here I am! I am coming to do your will. He is abolishing the first sort to establish the second.
And this will was for us to be made holy by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ made once and for all." Hebrews 10: 9-10.

"Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could into the hill country to a town in Judah. She went into Zechariah's house and greeted Elizabeth.
Now it happened that as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, 'Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? Look, the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.'" Luke 1:39-45.

Week 4 of Advent finds us hearing a theological message of reunion and renewal. Micah's words anticipate a remaking of the terms under which we partner with God, and the passage from Hebrews moves this remaking forward to the Messianic era--our time, the time of the Kingdom now established among us. What does this vision of transformation mean for us?

The temptation is to understand the transition of the Covenants as a point of triangulation in history, clarifying where we are in time and human progress. Yet, we have to be careful lest we make ourselves arrogant about being "over" so many of our more primitive behaviors. The great philosophical debates of modernity are conditioned by the "historical fallacy." Since we are moderns, how could we not be so much better and so much better off than those ancient people?

The truth is, history is only useful if we will learn some lessons. The consequences of sin are ever present, as last week's tragedy in Connecticut shows us. We aren't far removed from the event remembered just three days after Christmas as the massacre of the holy innocents. At Christmas, when we celebrate a rise in our solicitude for one another, it is the most dreadful of ironies to worry that there are those among us whose pathologies render them devoid of empathy and subject not to some new sort of perversity but to powerful, atavistic malice. The wounds of humankind are deep, abiding, transmitted from one generation to the next in a dystopic metaphor of DNA transfer.

But the near approach of the birth of the Messiah, laid out with a serious tone in today's first two readings, challenges us to consider the vision of a new kind of society under a new authority. The nearness of God is for Christians the foundation-stone of all the inner riches of our spirituality. But somehow we must find here the elements of a renewed social edifice as well, beginning with the webs that tie us to family, school and work, and political community. Note how Micah ties the arrival of the "future ruler of Israel" to a time when God's people "will be secure." This is not an isolated or obscure strand of prophetic thought in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The same medieval Jewish mystic and poet, Yehuda Ha-Levi, who could write the fervent, "O Lord, where shall I find Thee?/All-hidden and exalted is Thy place," also authored the formidable treatise called the "Kuzari," which gained an influential role in the great conversation of his day on natural right and just polity. There is a tie between the quality of our personal faith and life and the life of the nation.

The author of Hebrews also binds the great with the humble, the noble with the mean, the universal with the particular: "this [God's] will was for us to be made holy by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ made once and for all." The Creator becomes a singular and exemplary one of us and everything is made new. The invitation is received and accepted, or not, within the intimacy of the personal encounter.

And the family of God, the Son, is suddenly present in that most intimate familial setting, the mother's womb. Depicted by St. Luke, this presence is accompanied by the haste and excitement of a family assembling joyfully--preparing for Christmas! There is the divine calling to the human will, and Elizabeth's child "leapt for joy." A miracle forces us to make a decision about the Nature of things, their sensory and public dimension, and that is what Elizabeth acknowledges, joining the new community consisting of Mary and Joseph and the unborn Savior.

So this Christmas birth points beyond as its power moves within. It is a miracle, by definition. We pray that our hearts will open to receive the newborn King, but the marks of the King's presence within are rightfully accompanied by contagious excitement, communication and the transformation of family and community. Peter Maurin, no friend of the "frozen chosen," calls these energies the "dynamite of the Church" that needs to be detonated. This means something for parents--to think seriously about the community of the family, to consider lovingkindness when patience is in short supply and openness to new circumstances when we discover that our children have minds of their own and aren't following the script we thought we wrote. Truly the script we didn't write invites us to explore God's will and the fuller dimensions of our acceptance and compassion.

For those of us who teach there is also a challenge to move toward the model of Jesus, who did not teach like the others: His lessons were vivid and honest, his manner consistent, his relations with students comfortable and democratic.  He was their delight.  He let His Truth speak for itself, pleasing some and angering others. Finally, and with significance for us considering the events of these weeks, he was empty of self-will--able to truly give the substance of his life for those in his care.  The behavior of the teachers and administrators, those who died and those who lived, in the public school in Connecticut is an example to all.

Finally, let us note that there is very little about the liturgical calendar that is accidental. The Masses of Advent and the Christmas season open a full jar of rich connections. Following Christmas Day, we find the memorial of the Holy Innocents and then the feast of the Holy Family. What greater contrast--from the utter loss of human-family sensibility caused by pathological solipsism, to the Gospel image of its hoped-for perfection of unity and loving-kindness now that the Kingdom is at hand and God is truly with us. The miracle of Christmas, the Incarnation, invites us to make the choice every day in favor of the glorious reality at the true heart of things.

We turn last to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins:
"And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

It's Christmas. Eat richly, read richly, contemplate richly. Find the richness of family things, literal and metaphorical, in all your comings and goings this season.

Advent 2012 Week 3

On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged!
The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a mighty savior;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
and renew you in his love,
he will sing joyfully because of you,
as one sings at festivals. Zephaniah 3,17-18.

The Lord is near.
Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,
make your requests known to God.
Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4,6-7.

"What should we do?"
"Teacher, what should we do?"
"And what is it that we should do?"
Now the people were filled with expectation,
and all were asking in their hearts
whether John might be the Christ. Luke 3, 10-18.

The readings for Week 3 are a festival of anxiety and expectation, but also an opportunity for some grown-up soul-searching. Their message is especially true this weekend, when we once again see the cycle of evil become a part of our national experience. We will hear a multitude of explanations about the many factors that contribute to such manifest horror as the face-to-face murder of close family and of innocent children. The world awaits words that will suffice as wisdom: "What should we do?"

In the Gospel for Week 3, Jesus' earliest public advocate, John the Baptist, does his seeming best with the questions of the day, reminding the inquirers that they have moral duties that they have been taught: to be generous, to be modest in their desire for worldly wealth, and to give others the benefit of the doubt in day-to-day exchanges. It's the truth, but almost on the level of platitudes, like the speeches of Polonius in "Hamlet."

Like John's "everyman" portrayed by Luke, we also have a tendency to seek simplistic answers for what troubles us. As teachers we find so much blame to pass around for why things aren't easier: "I'm not paid enough. I have too much to do. The administrator and department chair don't get it. The parents (a) don't care, (b) spoil their kids and never say no to them, (c) think they can buy a diploma, (d) are conspiring to get me fired. My peers have done such a poor job teaching that I have to fix what they did wrong. The culture is full of negatives. The students today have it too easy and won't work. Their priorities are all wrong. They think they will become billionaire athletes, performers or celebrities, so their sense of entitlement knows no bounds." This, and much more, is our conventional wisdom, the easy answer-set addressing our everyday question, "What should we do?" We have all these impossible fixes to carry out, so who can blame us for living at the edge of despair no matter how hard we work.

We who have answered the teacher's vocation, and who take our hearing of the Scriptures seriously, are challenged to consider how the conventional wisdom is not enough to satisfy us in the roles of teachers, members of families and persons looking for a level of Truth capable of drawing us forward with joy from day to day.

John the Baptist really is a good teacher who knows that much. When pressed, he risks more--after all, he is also a seer, a prophet. Zephaniah and the others of the fellowship of the prophets had already dared to push the boundaries of the conventional and simplistic outlook on the world. These visionaries seek News that liberates heart and soul.

Platitudes are not enough, Zephaniah says, we must push past these to the mystery of God's work, not ours--in ourselves, in our students, in our world. Zephaniah is the prophet of the Day of Yahweh. He warns about its coming, but he also invites: "When that day comes, the message ... will be: Zion, have no fear ... Yahweh your God is there with you ... He will renew you by his love." (New Jerusalem trans.). In other words, raise your vision higher so that the ultimate and truest hope becomes the shaper of your attitudes and our deeds.

One of the daily prayers from the past week talks about our anticipation of an end to "the long night of Advent." St. Paul is able to say "The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all...." While he praises the Philippians for their kindness and good sense, the thing that matters is their trust in "the peace of God, which surpasses understanding."

Back to John the Baptist: Luke's recounting of the episode recalls how John, in the role of Prophet, tells that "One mightier than I is coming ... To clear his threshing floor, to gather the wheat into his barn ... And burn the chaff in unquenchable fire." This might make us apprehensive rather than lessen our fears and insecurities. Luke understood the Christian truth of the matter, for he concludes that John, in this and "in many other ways, ...preached good news to the people." Good news? The Day of God?

We're invited this week to sober up and see things in the right perspective. It's not our everyday complaining, our focus on minutiae, important as attending to many of our daily duties and being good stewards in our field of responsibility can truly be, that will allow us to find God with us on Christmas and every other day. It is this arrival of Heaven "within the geography of the heart," as Pope Benedict has said, that allows us to work to be a fellowship of hope. One of the TV priests, Fr. Jonathan Morris, interviewed about the Newtown tragedy, asked by the news anchor what those who are hurting should do, began his answer by saying "It's all about Heaven." When we model this hope--truly a Christmas Gift--for ourselves, our students, our peers, our supervisors and employers, and our society, then our ears will open to hear and our hearts will prepare to do the Good News.

Advent 2012 Week 2

"I pray always with joy in my every prayer for all of you, because of your partnership for the gospel from the first day until now I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
"And this is my prayer: that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God." Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11.

In the first reading for the second Sunday of Advent, St. Paul 's message almost casually ambles into the theme of discernment raised by the Responsorial Psalm of last week. From knowing ourselves in humility we are directed to know what is important and what is not. It almost sounds like a platitude, but is another stiff challenge to us. We--teachers--like to think we are good at discernment.

After all, we read student papers, assign grades, prepare what we think are necessary and appropriate presentations, lectures and activities, and discuss and correct student behavior so that these young people might be shaped into knowledgeable, worthwhile and contributing adults. We create lesson plans, follow the assigned curriculum, work with our administrators and peers to help the school be worthy of its stated mission and worry about how all of this will serve the needs of today's student, about whose abilities, study habits and inclination to learn we often have serious doubts. All of these genuine concerns press on our consciences and cause us a degree of day-to-day stress. It's part of being a teacher who cares, but it's a burden to carry.

St. Paul seems completely aware that those to whom he is writing are in need of the prayers that he offers for us. We should be thankful! He knows perfectly well that God's good work is only just begun in us, or he would congratulate us on having achieved perfection. But he gives us some time to get it right: "until the day of Christ Jesus." We're in our grace period, maybe even our extended time, and we must honestly acknowledge that we genuinely need every minute to even begin to exercise Gospel charity for those in our care in the same manner that St. Paul cares for his apprentices, for whose good and whose presence he longs "with the affection of Jesus Christ."

St. Paul's community has something to learn and a goal to achieve if they will be worth something in their vocation as partners for the gospel. The content of the curriculum is "knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value." The goal of our teacher-formation program is to "be pure and blameless" and "filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ." Kierkegaard, the pastor's boy and an astute, if odd, reader of Saints Paul and Augustine, understood that the category of true Christians was a finite set of one: Jesus. (I know he wasn't Catholic, and so did not avail himself of Marian doctrine, etc.) The point is well taken. We need help.

Let's remember that Advent is the "grace period" par excellence. The Creator has extended our time and our expectation forward into the fulfillment of all history. Let's pray this Advent that we continue to receive St. Paul's prayers and that we be open to his teaching. Let's pray that we learn our calling and our craft better. Let's pray for perception--to find and acknowledge the person of Jesus newly born in every one of our students, because that is "what is of value" for each student and for each of us as well. Let's pray for discernment, that we receive the grace to speak of what is best in our students (and our peers) and know and live what is best in us. Finally, let's be encouraged that our teacher for this week, St. Paul, expresses "confidence ... that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus."

Advent 2012 Week 1

Today's Psalm (25) is striking:

Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;
teach me your paths,
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my savior,
and for you I wait all the day.

Good and upright is the LORD;
thus he shows sinners the way.
He guides the humble to justice,
and teaches the humble his way.

All the paths of the LORD are kindness and constancy
toward those who keep his covenant and his decrees.
The friendship of the LORD is with those who fear him,
and his covenant, for their instruction.

There ought to be a book about the "education Psalms." Certainly the whole trajectory of Scripture is aimed at the making explicit the content of the revealed truth that God is with us--by virtue of the primordial history of Genesis, the Patriarchs, the liberating events of the wondrous flight from Egypt, the desert wanderings, the up-and-down history of the Israelites, the powerful witness of the line of the Prophets, the endlessly fascinating mixture of the Writings, and the "new primordial history" of the first community of the Church. But there is contained here also an invitation to a reflective dimension describing how God teaches, in addition to what God teaches.

Our job, especially as teachers, is to consider what kind of students we are, to examine our readiness to learn, and to consider what kind of students God considers us to be. Do we examine ourselves with the same kind of clarity and compassion with which we see the young persons who assemble before us at each class period? How deeply do we consider that we are also learners as we expect the students to be. Think about it: God teaches not only the avid, friendly and hard-working souls. As the Gospels witness, God teaches and shows an infinite caring and adaptability facing the reluctant, closed-minded and hardly-working folk in the community of the Church as well.

Take it a little further: we say, as Thomas Aquinas does, that learning happens "according to the capacity of the receiver." Do we consider that God approaches us in deference to the style that is effective for us? Are we the readers, the doers, the actors, the can't-sit-down types, the shout-it-out types? If the attribution is correct, St. Francis' much-quoted advice must apply to us as well: "Preach always; if necessary, use words."

So I invite each of you, theologians, to use this first week of Advent as a mini-retreat to consider yourselves God's literal learners. We all must grow in self-awareness so that our pedagogy and our lives are more truly "with God."