Tuesday of the First Week of Advent
The prophet Isaiah in today’s reading describes an idyllic state, a utopia in which violence has been destroyed and, as the fairy tale ending states, everyone lived happily ever after. The search for the perfect place has always been a desire of the human community. Communism offered a glimpse of the perfect world in the workers' paradise of Minsk and consumerism holds out that perfection can be attained by the latest fashion. Perfection, Catholic teaching holds, is found at the beatific vision, when at the end of time, we see “Christ as he is” (1 John 3). Yet in the Our Father we pray that what we experience on earth should imitate the Kingdom yet to be. This seeming contradiction receives some resolution in the idea of the Kingdom of Christ, the fest we celebrated the Sunday before Advent started. In this Kingdom, we strive for the fullness of human dignity by means of the Love of God and in that dual expression we experience a real presence of the kingdom yet to be. Perhaps the greatest gift, if not the greatest challenge, is that we are not bystanders in the project, rather, we are invited to be active participates in the struggle to bring about the ultimate happy ending.