Advent Reflections 2021

First Week of Advent

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘When these things begin to take place, stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand. Watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness and the cares of life, and that day will be sprung on you suddenly, like a trap. For it will come down on every living person on the face of the earth. Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.’

Apart from anything else, the gospels are great art, in fact supreme spiritual art. Like all art, they reflect what human beings  like us feel and they illuminate those feelings with transformative insights. We sense they know us before we read them. They bring into the field of consciousness what normally remains on the non-verbal, un-imagined borderlands. Listened to wisely they make the invisible visible. But they achieve this through interaction with our interpretation. They are not magic and do not treat us like infants. If we merely take the words and images literally, we miss the opportunity to look behind the screen and, like Daniel, to ‘gaze into the visions of the night’. Let’s use the next four weeks to encounter these forces of wisdom we call the gospels in a new and more intimate way.

As we begin Advent, a time set aside by ancient liturgical wisdom to prepare us for a true celebration of Christmas, we are first presented with a series of apocalyptic prophecies. Today we have got used to what seems doom and gloom messages in relation to climate change predictions, financial corruption, wars and the tragedies suffered by refugee families callously used as objects of politicians or traffickers. But the words of Jesus in the gospel for the first Sunday of Advent, the description of a Day of Reckoning is still chilling. Many Christians misread them as predictions (which are not the same as prophecies) and take them literally. They do so despite the fact that Jesus, speaking as the culmination of the lineage of biblical prophets, refers to things that happen in every age. Check today’s news.

Perhaps the tendency to take them literally reveals a fear of what they actually do mean. They illustrate each human being’s sense of mortality as well as the terror that arises from a world of constant change over which we have little control. Easier to convince yourself that the world will go up in flames tomorrow than to live peacefully with the fact that any of us could pass away before today ends.

Yet these prophecies are not sensationalist and do not end with the instilling of fear. Instead there is the injunction to be awake, alert, to reject the debauchery of harmful distraction by discovering the hidden but ever-present reality of continuous prayer. Look inwards, not up at the sky. Be present to the present that is present rather than imagining tomorrow.

The ‘Way’ of the gospel is not to live in fear and trembling. It is to recognise when we are manipulated by fear, from our unconscious or from the media, and to choose the way of ‘liberation’ instead. The true End is this liberation from fear of the end.

Let me suggest for each week of Advent a skill to learn. This week it could be to guard your heart and mind from fear and its progeny, to expose it and dance freely over it.

Laurence Freeman OSB 28 November 2021

Second Week of Advent

The word of God came to John son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. He went through the whole Jordan district proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the sayings of the prophet Isaiah: A voice cries in the wilderness:

Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight. Every gulley will be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low, winding ways will be straightened and rough roads made smooth. And all mankind shall see the salvation of God. (Luke 3:1-6)

Luke likes to put the story he is telling about Jesus in the context of world history. From his account of the political leadership in power when John the Baptist, a kinsman of Jesus, started his preaching, we know that they were both about the age of 30 when they emerged on the public stage.

A little private part of us believes we never really grow up. Despite all our experience we have a sense of a continuum of identity from our earliest memories. Even if  ‘I have changed beyond recognition’ we do recognise the I who has changed. And then there are our issues, our interests, problems, fantasies and fears. These can be managed better or get camouflaged as we mature but are essentially ineradicable. They were instilled by both our genes and our earliest environment and emotional experiences. The turning points in our personal history, whatever is going on in the world around us, is how we hear our own personalised call and how we respond.

John the Baptist is the last of the old-style prophets. In modern caricature he is funny – funny as weird not humorous. He would be depicted as half-naked with dreadlocks, eating insects and honey and shouting at people on the platform as they wait for the morning train that the end of the world is coming because of the degeneracy of the times. Yet in his day he was seen differently. People flocked to him with the most fundamental of all ethical questions: ‘Then what are we to do?’ His reply was simple: share what you have, do not exploit others, do not abuse power, practice integrity.

So far, he is recognisable. We still want to hear what the prophets of our own time have to say even if we find it hard to distinguish the genuine from the false ones, conspiracy theory from the always more nuanced truth. How do we ever learn to trust again? Maybe by the other thing he told them to do: repent and ask forgiveness for our sins. And how do we remember what repentance and sin really mean without becoming guilt-ridden or self-righteous about our being repentant and converted? Perhaps by remembering why the Cloud of Unknowing says that ‘this work (of meditation) ‘dries up the root of sin within us’.

There is a certain sadness and end of an era feel about this intense, doomed and prophetic young man, touched by the word of God and driven out to preach in the Jordan Valley. But he is marginal in another way too. Only a step away from him is someone, actually a younger relative with another kind of charisma, that people will one day say himself embodies the Word of God and whom to know even a little means being changed (almost) beyond recognition.

Laurence Freeman OSB 5 December 2021

Third Week of Advent

When all the people asked John, ‘What must we do?’ he answered, ‘If anyone has two tunics he must share with the man who has none, and the one with something to eat must do the same.’ There were tax collectors too who came for baptism, and these said to him, ‘Master, what must we do?’ He said to them, ‘Exact no more than your rate.’ Some soldiers asked him in their turn, ‘What about us? What must we do?’ He said to them, ‘No intimidation! No extortion! Be content with your pay!’ A feeling of expectancy had grown among the people, who were beginning to think that John might be the Christ, so John declared before them all, ‘I baptise you with water, but someone is coming, someone who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to undo the strap of his sandals; he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn in a fire that will never go out.’ As well as this, there were many other things he said to exhort the people and to announce the Good News to them.
(Luke 3: 10-18)

When the obvious sounds strange or dramatic it’s a sign that we have wandered far from reality and got ourselves into a mess. When we try to extricate ourselves we often turn away from our leaders: after all, we think, they led us into the mess. So we look to other sources of wisdom or for direction.

The crowds, including some of their leaders, went out into the desert to ask one of the most marginal of society’s members, the prophet, ‘‘what shall we do?’. As the desert father, Abba Isaac, who taught Cassian to meditate, said when Cassian and his friend Germanus returned and asked how they should pray: “You are next door to understanding when you know what question to ask”. He then taught them – and succeeding generations - the mantra.

John the Baptist responded to the question ‘what shall we do’ not ‘how shall we pray’. So he tells them the obvious: be honest, don’t exploit the weak, be content with what’s enough. That this was necessary at all shows how corrupt and dysfunctional social life had become. This is a tendency in any society because of the way power and hierarchy work. But in a totalitarian state or a society occupied by a brutal force all social relationships are eventually corrupted and brutalised. This is the legacy of all periods of colonialism.

The prophet can be the spark for a conversion process – both interior and social. And indeed, both the inner and outer dimensions need to be converted. Baptism with water was the initial outward sign of this process of moral reform. But the vision of the Baptist saw deeper than the world of signs and appearances. He spoke of the next, the awaited, baptism of fire. And that is what we wait for in Advent: the point in time when time itself is flooded by the presence of God. It is a flood of fire in which the unreal disappears and only what is real then becomes blindingly obvious.

Laurence Freeman OSB 12 December 2021