Today is the first Sunday of Advent and the
beginning of the Church calendar. Typically the New Year is a time we reflect
on the year past and share our hopes for the year to come. We make new years
resolutions, boldly announcing that this year we will spend less time at work
and more time with our family, this is the year we are finally going to start
eating healthy or maybe this year we will finish that art class we have started
so many times before.
There is nothing wrong with making plans
and setting goals, but for the most part the kind of new years resolutions we
make rise or fall on the back of our own effort, our own strength or
determination. By beginning its calendar with the season of Advent, a time
thick with anticipation of God’s fulfillment, the church reminds itself once
again that our hope lies not in ourselves but in God.
Richard Rohr has written a book of daily
meditations for the season of Advent titled Preparing
for Christmas (I purchased it as an e-book from Amazon for less than $3).
On the first page Rohr wonderfully captures what it means to live as an Advent
people.
““Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means
that all of Christian history has to live out a kind of deliberate emptiness, a
kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always open to come, and we
do not need to demand it now. This keeps the field of life wide open and
especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.
This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can
also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all
appropriate! Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a
forewarning about the high price of consciousness.”
Richard Rohr – Preparing for Christmas:
Daily meditations for Advent
This Advent may we practice living lives of
‘deliberate emptiness’ leaning into
God’s great promises for us and our world.
Grace and Peace
Harlee.
