Tear open the heavens

O, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for. Isa 63:19b,64:2

I cannot think of Advent without thinking of Alfred Delp, SJ, who in 1944 spent the Advent and Christmas seasons in a Nazi prison. Delp’s writings, letters and reflections on Advent, were smuggled out from prison on scraps of paper by two friends. In one letter, he wrote that he thought it would be a beautiful Christmas. Under such circumstances you might wonder how? 

Delp was handcuffed night and day and confined to a small cell, facing a death sentence. There would be no moving liturgies, no exquisite manger scenes. But with all the ornaments and romantic imagery stripped away, Delp said he could see clearly the shaking reality of what Christmas promised: God in the flesh, God taking a stand with us against the unimaginable darkness. Christmas, offered Delp, is the chance to celebrate the mystery of the great howling hunger of humankind for God — if we are willing to give over our complacency and pretensions.

In Advent’s dark and cold days I am, I confess, often drawn to meditate on the gentle mysteries of a babe wrapped and warm, puffy sheep in the fields and angels in the sky trailing glory. Wondrous stars. Enigmatic strangers from the East. Gold and rare spices. It is the proper and cherished stuff of Christmas pageants. Yet this isn’t quite what the People of God asked for through Isaiah, “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” begs Isaiah, “be what we don’t dare hope for.”

Delp wrote that to live in the knowledge that the divine and the human have collided in time requires a willingness to let our romantic notions be burned off, that we might have a clear vision of what is and could be.  

Dare we join with Isaiah and cry out to the heavens this Advent, imploring God to do for us what we cannot bring ourselves to hope for? Might the hungry be fed, might the migrant find safe harbor, might God visit peace on the nations? Shine forth from your cherubim throne, O Lord. Rouse your power and rend the heavens.

— Adapted from M. Francl-Donnay, Waiting in Joyful Hope, Liturgical Press, 2020.

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More reading about Delp:

Mary Frances Coady, With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (Chicago: Jesuit Way, 2003).

Alfred Delp, SJ and Thomas Merton. Alfred Delp, S.J: Prison Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004).

And a beautiful choral setting of the Isaiah text (H/T to my friend Marie).

Moving into Advent

I bought the four volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours in 1987, the summer after Tom died. I’d been keeping the hours for a couple of years at that point, having happened on a small volume that included a two week cycle of Morning and Evening Prayer and Night Prayer for Sundays.  Those four volumes were an extravagance at the time, but I so wanted the texts of the Office of Readings, to keep vigil with on those many nights when I couldn’t sleep. 

Saturday night I pulled the first volume — Advent and Christmas season — off the shelf in my small prayer space. Each year I mark the start of the new liturgical year by re-reading the instructions that are included in this volume. It’s a reminder to pray mindfully rather than on auto pilot.  There is always some nuance that I’ve missed in previous readings.

This year I was struck by Pope Paul VI’s reminder that when we celebrate the office it is both our voices echoing in Christ, and Christ’s voice echoing in ours. He reminds us too that we are called to a warm and living love of the Scriptures, particularly the psalms. On a cold night, sitting to pray by a warm fire, I am drawn to the warmth of that inner fire as well.

As I paged through the rest of the volume, resetting ribbons as I go, I remember those whose prayer cards are tucked into the propers of the Saints. My mother, the mother of a close friend, the priest who gave me my first communion, the young daughters of two friends. There are photos of my children when they were very small, and one of a sunrise that I saw on the long retreat. There is a page marked with a blank strip of paper, and — on a fine piece of rice paper — a list of the O antiphons waiting for those last Advent days. 

I’m moving into Advent, looking back at where I’ve been and forward to what is to come.

A seething season

Come down, begged Isaiah, that the mountains might quake and the nations tremble. As fire makes water swell and seethe, so will your wondrous deeds be known across the earth, promises the prophet. I am struck by this imagery as I stand in my dark kitchen, watching the water in the glass kettle swell and seethe as it comes to the boil, and contemplate Isaiah’s images. Bubbles tumble about, irrepressible, ever changing, refracting the blue light of the flame until the water seems to glow of its own accord. 

For all that I yearn for a season filled with quiet and prayerful moments to spend preparing for God’s coming, it is not to be. Like the water in the kettle, my Advents seethe, boiling over with things-to-be-done and people-to-be-seen. Yet despite the end of year chaos — or perhaps because of it — the rich images in the Advent Scriptures dance irrepressibly through my days. They spill forth light, shining beacons in the drearing days. They draw me deeply into that super-luminous darkness, the depths where God dwells.

I find in Advent not so much a refuge from the demands of my life and of the world as a series of mysterious contradictions that leave me slightly off balance, stumbling forward. The Scriptures of this season promise us light in the midst of the darkness, but they also make clear the demands the kindling of such a light place upon us. They disrupt my preconceptions about what it means that God has come to dwell among us, forcing me to come face to face with what it means for me, here and now, to encounter God in human form. 

In an Advent General Audience, Pope Francis spoke of the manger as an invitation to contemplation, a reminder of the importance of stopping. Contemplation is sometimes called the art of stealing time. I am committing to stealing a few moments each day this Advent to listen to God’s irrepressible, radiant Word, to wrestle with what it means to incarnate the Risen Lord.

For all that Advent propels us toward Christmas, the stable in Bethlehem is not a destination. It is a way station, a momentary gathering of those who will be dispatched to all corners of the earth. Strangers and shepherds and angels stop and then depart as quickly as they came. Not to follow the same paths they came by but sent on to new roads and new lives. May our lives, too, be open to being transformed by what God has done and is doing in the world. 

— Adapted from M. Francl-Donnay, Waiting in Joyful Hope, Liturgical Press, 2020.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

 It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a 1963 movie which I'm pretty sure I remember my parents going to see in the theater (I would have been in kindergarten). I've never seen the movie, but it's an apt title for tomorrow. I have class to teach, two meetings, and appointments with 5 students. My calendar is bleeding green (the color I use to denote work commitments.) If it were Vulcan, it would need Dr. M'Benga.

I front loaded stuff into Wednesday and today, and worked after dinner. I will need the Sabbath this weekend. Maybe I'll watch the movie. Or maybe I'll watch Dune?

New Book: Prayer

It’s a book! I’m proud to announce that my latest has just launched from Liturgical Press. 

The book is designed to be used as a point of departure for reflection, either individually or in a group. I wrote it as a retreat, the questions for reflection in the margin mirroring my own reflections as I wrestled with the material.

In addition to the biblical wisdom, there is wisdom from the desert mothers and fathers (Amma Syncletica and Abba Poemen both have their moments and saints and blessed from Augustine to Ignatius of Loyola to Dorothy Day. I sought to pull in a diverse set of voices, women and men from many eras.

I have to thank my delightful editor, Amy Ekeh, whose deft surgery on my too-long manuscript managed to keep the structure intact and who was behind me all the way as we sought illustrations that would be in the budget, but still reflect the diversity of the People of God. Also, no blonde, blue-eyed Jesuses. My favorite image has to be the great doors to Sagrada Familia in Barcelona with the Our Father on them in 50 languages. 

I am grateful, too, to the spiritual directors and soul friends who have walked with me, literally and metaphorically, through the years. 

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Autocorrect tried to replace Poemen with  Pokémon. The desert mystics, catch them all?