What's Going On?

Adversity can play a key role in honing our ability to hear what is beyond the usual scope of our ordinary consciousness. Facing stressful challenges outside the norm of our usual experience can heighten our awareness of events that otherwise would go unnoticed. Samuel Johnson put it nicely “Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Not coincidentally and almost by definition, our Advent readings occur during the so-called Holiday Season. It’s a time when friends and family get together. With the Thanksgiving weekend over, it’s time to move on to Christmas. As enjoyable as these social activities are, we seek respite, time alone and a return to the solitary comfort of our home. It is precisely for such clarity and insight that people seek out desert experiences such as solitary retreats, in which we step away from many of the usual supports of life, family, friends, familiar surroundings and routine, in order to be open to God’s call. This is a time for personal transformation that may be revealed on tip toes or in the sound of gun fire.

Unlike John-the-Baptist in Luke 3:1-6 , we don’t always get a chance to choose our desert times and places. They sometimes are provided for us in the form of illness, change in employment, failures in relationships, death of a loved one and even, natural disasters. These deserts all hold new possibilities for hearing the word of God at ever deepening levels. They have a way of “concentrating our mind wonderfully.”

For the past three weeks much of the news and focus of our discussions have been on the reports of urban terrorists’ attacks and civil unrest, all of which are comingled with the noise of advertisements beating the drum for Black Friday; pre-Christmas sales, and the hollow political rhetoric of candidates and their commentators. How do we process all this, much less try to make sense of it? What’s going on? The question harkens back to another turbulent time in our Nation’s history when the Marvin Gaye song of the same name asked the question and in some ways served as a mantra for the time: Mother, mother There's too many of you crying; Brother, brother, brother; There's far too many of you dying…we don’t need to escalate…what’s going on?

Our Scripture discussions in recent weeks have channeled world events and our being asked to keep awake and be ready. It goes hand in hand with the uncertainty of what’s going on today but, making sense of it is easier said than done. We really have to work hard to find God in all this. Words come much more easily than the reality of recognizing him, in ourselves and in those who are hurting. “The Christian community is the place where we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously, so that it can grow and become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without being seduced constantly by despair, lostness and darkness. That is how we say that God is a God of love even when there is hatred all around us.We need to wait together to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the word comes it can become flesh in us.” (Waiting for God, Henri Nouwen)