A time for way-finding

 

As soon as the first Sunday of Advent dawns, I feel as if Christmas is already pounding at the kitchen door, demanding to be let in. Boxes piled high in her arms, she’s humming Unto Us a Child Is Born, trailing tinsel and lights and a long list of “must be dones” behind her. Wait, I say, my back to the door. I have other plans for Advent.  I always do. 

I plan to sit, to stay, to wait. I love to linger in these enclosed days where the sun is struggling to get above the trees. I yearn to stand outside in the sharp night air and watch the stars burn and the planets serenely transit the sky, knowing that God has counted us all. I covet time to soak in the readings from Isaiah that sing of breathtaking possibilities, of a God set down in the midst of his weary, war-torn people, pulling us by the hand out of darkness. I hunger for time to pray. 

The reality is my Advent plans inevitably collapse under the weight of the year’s end. My office is crowded with students hoping I can help them pull their grades up, while piles of papers to mark threaten an avalanche on my desk. Isaiah waits hopefully on the chair in the corner, along with my lunch. I promise myself a few minutes after Sunday Mass to sit with God in the warm stillness of my parish church, but the nave is alive with rehearsing angels and shepherds and wise men. Dear God. That’s about as far as I get. Dear God, I sigh, and wait, still thirsting for what I cannot quite grasp. 

After all these years, it’s starting to dawn on me that perhaps these unsettled Advents are the plan. The season asks not that I wait, placidly or otherwise, for the inevitable arrival of Christmas day, but it demands I acknowledge why I cannot settle patiently for what is here and now. My soul is thirsting for God, the God of my life; when can I enter and see the face of God?  Like the psalmist, I ache to see the unveiled face of God, to plunge into depths that my beloved winter skies only hint at. 

Advent isn’t a season of the present, no matter how demanding the to-do list, or of the past, as dazzling the miracle of God come among us was and is. Advent is a time for way-finding, a glimpse of our destination. 

I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s Magi, who had a hard time of it, battling refractory camels and inhospitable towns. I imagine them returning to their homes, leaning into the wind, knee deep in slush and mud, never again at ease.

Advent isn’t calling me to linger, but to lean into the chaos, to live on the road, plans never firm, never quite settled. We are all milling about, like those tiny angels and shepherds, rehearsing for an encounter we only dare to imagine. Dear God, this is the people who long to see your face. 

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Michelle M. Francl-Donnay. From Give Us This Day, December 2018.

 

I thirst

"I thirst." It's has more of a Lenten flavor than an Advent one, I admit. Yet it feels so apt for me this Advent in particular. Advent was once a longer season, sometimes called Saint Martin's Lent for the feast of the saint (St. Martin of Tours on 12 November) that marked its start. I feel like we've been living in a long Lenten season through this pandemic. We have been fasting not feasting, for so long.

I thirst for a brightly lit house full of people. For years I have made a fancy breakfast for my physical chemistry students. I break out the china, make rich casseroles of cream and sausage and vegan treats from cranberries and rice, redolent of cinnamon and nutmeg. I lay a fire and make plenty of coffee and these days more often than not several pots of tea. I enjoy this little breath between the end of the semester and the start of the final exams, and hope my students do too. But there was no breakfast last year and there is no breakfast this year, instead I will stuff exams into envelopes and hand them out on the last day of class.

And so I was particularly grateful on Saturday evening to find the trees outside my parish church wrapped in blue violet lights, and the altar adorned for Advent. Incense rose from behind the presider's chair, and the lights have been dimmed ever-so-slightly. The shift from Ordinary Time to the new season was palpable.  I was thirsty for more than just the bare minimum, longing for a reminder of the depths that await us.

To thirst is perforce to wait. To wait for something that we desperately need as well as long for. There is no life without water. I am thirsting for the Living God. 

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.