28 November 2021
First Sunday of Advent
Advent is a season of movement. Although the nighttime hours are increasing relative to the daylight hours, although much is slowing down and becoming still with the cold and chill of winter, nevertheless, this is the season when the Church focuses on spiritual movement in a unique way. “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul!” We pray with the psalmist. In the Opening Prayer, or Collect, we beg God for “the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming…” It is a time when the readings help us to meditate on the movement of God who always goes before us, walks with us, and follows after us. When time with family (or perhaps alone) around Thanksgiving and Christmas stirs within us many movements of the heart: joy, frustration, anger, sadness, peacefulness; it is just at this time that with the Church we can take those movements within our soul and lift them up to the Lord who is coming.
Advent directs us to take the movements within our hearts and to seek to align them more and more with the movements within the heart of Christ. “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul! Your ways, O Lord, make known to me; teach me your paths…” In the book of the prophet Jeremiah we hear that “The days are coming…” days of fulfillment of the divine promises for a just king. We remember that the heart of God is moved by the needs of His People, especially the need for true justice, divine justice, which not only corrects wickedness, but also establishes a peace which the world cannot give. With His divine heart stirred by the needs of His children, the Lord is on the move, is coming with the righteousness which will fulness of peace, “In those days Judah shall be safe, and Jerusalem shall dwell secure…” A beautiful promise, but one which sets before us a path of conversion to walk on (or to run in, as we pray in the Collect) to go out to meet the Lord who comes.
Jesus warns us not to get sluggish and complacent. “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life…” Rather, we are to raise our hearts to the Lord who comes, “…when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is near at hand.” As we begin to pray anew with the whole Church about the Coming of Christ, let us ask the Lord to teach us, to show us what has been making our hearts drowsy lately, what has been weighing down our minds. Let us lift up to the Lord these deeds, these concerns, along with our whole soul. Then we can be caught up in the movement of God, the love which moves even the stars (as Dante writes), and which can move us with him.