Our Lady of Lourdes Church and School

The First Sunday of Advent marks the beginning of the new liturgical year in the life of the Church. Odd though it may sound, within Church circles it’s appropriate to say “Happy New Year”. The signs of it are both visual and aural. Purples appear in Church for these few weeks, marking the transition between Ordinary time with its greens and Christmas with its whites. We begin our listening to Mark’s gospel, leaving Matthew behind for the next two years, with occasional contributions from John’s gospel. Our singing in Church is different, as we sing hymns that are both familiar and unfamiliar, not quite Christmas and yet… And all of this goes on against the backdrop of a “secular Christmas” which began the day after Thanksgiving.

This might sound “odd”, but I like the dissonance this conflicting sense of seasons brings to those who reflect on the passing of time and the marking of seasons and holidays. I don’t hold that Christmas is being robbed of its meaning by its commercialization. The dissonance allows me to reflect a little more deeply on how all time belongs to God, the Α (Alpha) and the Ω (Omega). Sacred time, secular time, all time belongs to God. As I drive along in the car and listen to the Christmas songs playing on the ancient device once known as a “radio”, still, I find myself interiorly praying with a heart for Advent, with a heart filling with anticipation of Christmas.  Living in the moment of both the “now” and the “not yet” is a reality into which Christians are consistently called to live. The Kingdom of Heaven is both “now” and “not yet”. The Messianic coming is both “now” and “not yet”. The reality of who I am in the world, by human being-ness and my becoming, is itself an experience of the “now” and “not yet”. As we gather in Church and we DO NOT sing Christmas songs, but instead sing songs of our Advent Season, even though our airwaves, our malls, our office parties, everywhere else wraps us in sounds of Christmas… The dissonance highlights what it is we celebrate - Incarnation - and at the same time our anticipation of the Great Feast of Incarnation.

Our own inner incompleteness is reflective of this tension, and our scriptures today underscore the tensions we sometimes experience:

“You, Lord, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” (Is 63:16b-17)

Who among us doesn’t echo and re-echo the same sentiment as St. Paul when he writes:

“For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.” (Rom 7:19)?

This is the “now” of our humanity. We might be tempted to wish it were different. We might be tempted to wish that God would simply make us live good lives and so that we might never digress from the path of goodness and truth. But then where is our freedom with which God graces and blesses us? How can we possibly love, when love requires the very freedom we might be tempted to give up in order to not have a choice to do something other than good in life? How can we choose to love God without the freedom that love requires?

The “not yet” of life is also held in this beautiful passage from Isaiah:

“Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands”

God is constantly inviting us to a relationship of love with him, to a relationship of eternal life in God. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus became one like us so that we might become like god, as Athanasius and the Ancient Church fathers attested (cf CCC 460). We are all in the process of becoming the person God is calling us to be both in the world and for the world. God, the master potter, continues to work with us, the clay in his hands. We are, in our own humanity, living examples of the tension of both being and becoming, of the “now” and the “not yet”.

Happy Advent. Happy New Year. Happy “becoming”.