№ 701. Advent

The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist (Bruegel)

Each year, in our Advent prayer, we give voice to our longing for the coming realm of the messiah when our present world's pains — war, poverty, hunger, climate change, violence, inequalities — will be no more. Even if we say we realize that our longing can never be fulfilled in this life, it still arises, again and again, from a deep and persistent place in our human hearts. In fact, I believe that many of the fissures in today’s society stem from groups of people who mistakenly think that joining this or that movement, following this or that leader, or destroying this or that enemy will bring about the perfect world. And the more the world's ills increase, the more people are tempted to join these groups.

How to break the cycle? One way, obviously, is to work to lessen the ills that feed it. We can feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, live sustainably, and fight racism, sexism and all the other -isms. But that will never be enough; there will always be more that needs to be done. Sometimes it seems that, as with Alice in Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass, we need to run as hard as we can to stay in the same place. To get anywhere, as the Red Queen said, we would need to run twice as fast.

The second way, paradoxically, may be to embrace our human world as Jesus embraced it — not to stop feeding the hungry or healing the sick, but to realize that it is precisely in this world of the poor, the sick, the hungry, the displaced and homeless where God is to be found. Maybe if we actually managed to create a perfect world — or, in the terms of science fiction, to discover a perfect universe somewhere else in the multiverse — God wouldn't be there. In fact, I sometimes wonder if maybe even Heaven isn't "painless." Maybe, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, we are supposed to be spending Heaven "doing good on earth" — still sharing in and helping to ameliorate the pains that bedevil earth's people even after we have left it. For me personally, the thought of an eternity of perfect peacefulness is sometimes a little frightening. I would want to "help God" in some way. I need to pray about this.