Advent - yeah, yeah, whatever

Some may be sick of hearing that Advent is a time of preparation: the Lord is coming, etc. etc. etc.

And in today’s first reading, we have yet another of Isaiah’s messianic prophecies: complete with verses included in Handel’s Messiah.

For some of us, the familiarity of all things Christmassy and Adventish may be like a thick syrup that covers our eyes, ears, and hearts: nothing gets through... and we want to get out.

We may need to scrape away the sweet patina of familiarity and find afresh the meaning of what God is trying to tell us.

If we have lost our tolerance for the sweetness of the season, perhaps it may be because we have had too much a taste of the bitterness of life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem comes to mind.

THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Now we turn again to the beginning of today’s first reading:

The desert and the parched land will exult…


Perhaps it is the most cynical among us whose soul is so parched, whose prayer feels so feeble, whose mind’s eye seems so full of darkness, whose heart is so frightened, whose inner silence is so deafening, and whose life seems so paralyzed who need God's grace the most.

Perhaps it is the most cynical and Christmas-weary of us who need this time of preparation more than anyone : to recognize all the places within our hearts and within our lives where we still need God - where we still need his healing, his love, and his grace – and to ask anew for him to come within us in a deeper, richer, and more powerful way this Advent and this Christmas.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.