Nov 30 AD 2008: First Sunday in Advent
Advent is a season of waiting for Christ's return. The Israelites in our readings today were longing for God's presence to restore them; they wanted God to come down so they could see Him face to face and be saved. We in turn wait for Jesus to come again so that we can experience the full realization of the hope we have as Christians. I value the reminder that Advent is to keep awake – I often forget to really long for Jesus to return: my mind is frequently bound by the mundane realities of this world or plans and anxieties that are temporal.
I've started reading a fascinating book by a guy called Adrian Nocent called “The Liturgical Year” (there are 150 pages on the Advent season, though – I will only be able to dabble! =p). He asks a good question: Is there a Christian way of hoping? Here is some food for thought from Nocent:
“Péguy, in one of his brilliant theological intuitions, saw hope as a little girl who goes off to school between her two big sisters, faith and love, holding each by the hand. He explains his meaning in his La porche de la deuxième vertu: In the eyes of those who see the three sisters passing, little hope is being guided by the other two; in fact, however, little hope is pulling forward the two who seem to be leading her...for the believer, his personal hope is inseparably connected with the hope of the entire Church and when united to the hope of the Church, it is oriented in two directions: toward Christ and toward the renewal of the world.
Christ? We await during Advent the actualization of his incarnation and then we celebrate Christmas, but we still hope and wait for his second coming. This is a hope that the non-believer cannot share, for it is contrary to what hope should normally be. This Christian hope is indeed a strange thing...why? Because the Christian hopes for what he already possesses! In the inscription of Pectorius we read: “(You hold) the Fish in your hand.”...Christian hope is thus compounded of certainty: that is, we hope for what we already possess. The powerful dynamism that inspires this hope of a reality we already possess and grasp, though we do not see it, is an intense light for faith and a joyful spur to love.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Not Liturgy per se, but a fine poem for this time of the year.
THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
- T.S. Eliot
And while I am on a TS Eliot run, we might as well include:
A SONG FOR SIMEON
Lord, they Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winder sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
Grant us they peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's
children?
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let they servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.
Praise God, for we have seen his salvation. The star of Bethlehem, as Gerald Manley Hopkins phrases it,"leads me to the sight of Him Who freed me from the self that I have been."
Amen, Amen.
Wonderful poems! Thanks for sharing them with us. =)
Post a Comment