December 3, 2017
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas
Isaiah 63:16b-17,19B; 64:2-7
Psalm 80
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:33-37
The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with an admonition to each of us to "turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel." The Liturgical Year begins with Advent which starts today, not with our own turning away from sin, but rather with our attention to God’s turning toward us "to come and to save us." God saves us fully in Jesus Christ who came the first time to save us, and will complete His mission of salvation when He comes again to establish His Kingdom, of which we long to be a part.
Advent is about our paying attention to God’s initiative and our being alert to His Grace offered to us in seeking us out to save and to redeem us. It’s about our hopeful expectation and waiting for Him.
We too often understand waiting in our contemporary world as wasting time. Our contemporary understanding prompts us to fill such time with surfing the net, playing games on our phones, hunting with our remote controls — in a word, to fill the silence of waiting with noise and distraction. The devil’s objective is to distract us from the silence where God reveals Himself to us and where we should be paying attention for God’s coming. So, it’s understandable that the contemporary world attempts to snatch Advent from us with the noisy and cultural demands that lure us into frenetic activity. Silence is needed for prayer. Without silence, our prayer soon becomes reduced to a list of wants that we present to God; we then subsequently abandon the act of attentive listening in prayer. Prayer ceases to be a conversation when silence is absent from us; prayer then can become a monologue or even an unfocused rant.
Just as silence enables prayer; noise provokes violence. It should not be surprising that so much of what passes currently for conversation in political discourse and in news reporting has become harsh and inflammatory of the violence that dominates us in our contemporary world. The conversation that we have with God in silence prompts us to become alert to His loving and selfless priorities for us that soon become, through a change of heart in us, our own priorities for our loved ones. As Cardinal Robert Sarah notes, "God’s first language is silence. Everything else is a poor translation. In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God." Advent is the opportunity for us to come to this understanding.
During these days take time for silence, just a few moments each day, alone or as a family, or with a group of friends. Ask God, as Isaiah does in today’s reading, to return to us and not to let us wander. So, as the shopping music attempts to indoctrinate us with the ideology that "we need a little Christmas, right this very minute!" Let’s silently petition God for the grace of a little Advent given lovingly to us in His own good time.
