The First Sunday of Advent
December 2, 2007
J.A. Loftus, S.J.
Every Advent there is a remarkable irony revealed as each brand new
liturgical year begins. It comes in the clash of times: liturgical time and socalled “real” time are most out-of-synch this time of year. Advent–in the
spiritual or liturgical sense–is a time of waiting, of patience, of silence and
expectation. And Christmas-time–in the secular, everyday sense, the month of
December–is, for so many people, a time of hectic, restless, exhaustion. They
don’t fit together well at all.
I have felt this tension every year I have been asked to preach in
Advent. And I always feel a failure. I start preaching–usually as much to
myself as to anyone else–about the quiet, gentle time of waiting for the Lord
Jesus. And by mid-December I am usually as pre-occupied and un-focused as
anybody. So this year my Advent message comes with an explicit warning:
this will not be easy for any of us. But here is a precious invitation the church
holds out for each of us in this season. And I don’t want any of us to miss it.
Dorothy Day provides a haunting image to ponder. She says: “Advent
is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be
born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment
of silence, and it is though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her.
One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand.
But the intentness with which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much
as a blanket of silence.”
Only some of us have actually known that experience of being physically
pregnant and waiting, waiting patiently and quietly, for new life to rustle and
be born. But all of us can learn from the image. Patient longing is what
Advent is about. Patience–a usually hidden virtue in 21st century America.
Patience-described by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as the “natural
heart’s ivy.” You know how ivy gently grows and covers so many buildings
in this town and on this campus; it is a quiet, gentle mantle of green that
softens all hard and craggy edges. So should it be on each of our souls:
natural heart’s ivy. It is quite comparable to Dorothy Day’s “blanket of
silence.” These are two images worth holding onto for the next four weeks:
the blanket of silence and patience as the natural heart’s ivy.
One of the great spiritual writers of the 20th century, Henri Nouwen,
quotes the French author Simone Weil on the root of patience. She says in one
of her notebooks: “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the
spiritual life.” So begin to ask yourself: for what are you waiting this Advent
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season? For what do you long–really long? Where is your world pregnant
with new life and will there be enough silence to hear the rustle? And how is
your patience? These are the questions of Advent.
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