17^th December

O Wisdom, you come forth from the mouth of the Most High.  You fill the universe and hold all things together in a strong yet gentle manner.  O come to teach us the way of truth.

18^th December

O Adonai [Lord] and leader of Israel, you appeared to Moses in a burning bush and you gave him the Law on Sinai. O come and save us with your mighty power.

19^th December

O stock of Jesse, you stand as a signal for the nations; kings fall silent before you whom the peoples acclaim.  O come to deliver us, and do not delay.

20^th December

O key of David and sceptre of Israel, what you open no one else can close again; what you close no one can open.  O come to lead the captive from prison; free those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

21^st December

O Rising Sun, you are the splendour of eternal light and the sun of justice.  O come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

22^nd December

O King whom all the peoples desire, you are the cornerstone which makes all one.  O come and save man whom you made from clay.

23^rd December

O Emmanuel, you are our king and judge, the One whom the peoples await and their Saviour.  O come and save us Lord, our God.

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*Just a quick note: If you don’t have the appropriate liturgical volumes at home, you can find readings for Mass, liturgy of the hours and the office of readings at Universalis Today.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice!  The Lord is near.

It’s sometimes hard, though, isn’t it, to bend the heart to the liturgical season if our hearts are somewhere else?  How can we rejoice if we’re submerged in grief?  Perhaps you’re not feeling happy at the moment.  Perhaps this command to rejoice seems as impossible as a command to fly.  It would be wonderful to feel more joyful, wouldn’t it?  Perhaps if we take a few moments to understand just what joy is, and to look a little deeper inside, we might just find some. Joy is not the same as happiness.

Our translation of Philippians 4:4-7 that forms our second reading on Sunday translates St Paul as commanding the Philippians, ‘always be happy in the Lord’.  Other translations (even the Good News!) use ‘rejoice’ rather than ‘be happy’.  I’m not a Hebrew scholar, so I don’t know why the Jerusalem Bible is translated that way.  Etymologically speaking, joy and happiness are not even distant cousins.  Joy is deep-seated and lasting; a much more profound thing than happiness.  Happiness is here today, gone tomorrow, back the day after.  By way of analogy, think of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4ff), who misunderstands what Jesus is offering her when he says he can give her water such that she will never thirst again.  Happiness is to joy what normal water is to Jesus’ living water. Joy is a fruit of the spirit.  Let’s look at the other fruits of the spirit.  St. Paul kindly lists them for us in his letter to the Galatians:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

To understand how joy fits into that list, let’s just take it out for a moment, and leave it to one side.  Look at the other fruits: love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Look back over your day for evidence of you using those fruits.  I bet you’ve used the lot.  I know I have – not perfectly and I don’t suppose anyone else noticed, but I know I have.  These fruits of the spirit underpin our works of charity (however tiny) and form the attitude in which they are done.  You can make a cup of tea for someone lovingly or grudgingly.  You can wait for the learner who stalled as the lights changed patiently or impatiently. You can forgive and be at peace, or harbour resentment and fume.  So what about joy, then?  Looking at ourselves like that, do we see joy playing its part in our lives?

If it’s not obvious, that’s because we are so used to it, we don’t even notice its presence. When we fail to be true to love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness or self-control, we notice – that’s conscience for you.  But what about when we fail to be joyful?  Do we notice?  How can we tell?  I’m poorly today and not feeling overwhelmingly happy.  Does that mean I’m failing to be true to the fruit of the spirit that is joy?  No, I don’t think it does, because that long-term, deep-seated Christian joy is still there and even today, despite my cough & cold, I have seen it at work. To find joy, I can only suggest that you look inside.  If you’re struggling to see it, ask the one who put it there to help you look: ask the Holy Spirit.  Once you’ve found it, ask the Holy Spirit to help you be more aware of the joy that is within you and rejoice, for the Lord is near.

To mark that feast when I was at school, the ‘Lily Procession’ was held on the second Sunday in Advent (still is, in fact).  We processed around the school chapel and immediate surroundings singing the Immaculata Litany whilst bearing lighted torches.  It was always a beautiful act of devotion – and I never had my hair or mantilla singed nor (knowingly) singed anyone else’s!

The Immaculata Litany contained about two dozen titles for Our Lady and it’s on one of those I’d like to reflect today: Mater sanctissima, or Mary Most Holy. Now you could say that it was easy peasy lemon squeezey for Mary to be holy – having been conceived free from original sin – but such a view perhaps tells us more about the way we think of holiness than about Mary’s sanctity.

For us, a large part of our journey in grace towards holiness is spent overcoming the results of original sin* and working to keep the latent tendency to sin in check.  We struggle against our pride, laziness, greed, jealousy, anger and so on, and just when we think that we have, through grace, won a scanty little triumph in one place, so we trip up and fall down in another.  It is perhaps like trying to climb the mountain of the Lord but having to use the ‘down’ escalator.

Because of this, we can lose sight of the top of the mountain and think that ‘running to stand still’ is our only aim.  We can spend so much of our spiritual energies combating vice (or cancelling out the ‘minus’) that we can lose sight of our mission to make ‘thy kingdom come’ (the ‘plus’ side of things). What about Mary’s holiness, then?  Being conceived free from original sin, she was spared that struggle against herself: grace would not have had a purifying function in her.  She needed to be free from that negative struggle because of the enormity of her specific vocation.  But she still needed to climb the mountain of the Lord.  Her path to holiness was – like ours – forged through sanctifying grace and yet it was radically different from ours: different but not easier.

The briefest look at her life reveals a life of real, hard work and heroic virtue.  Because she did not need to overcome the effects of original sin in herself, she was able to give herself fully to helping Jesus build up his kingdom and working for the redemption of mankind. The Immaculate Conception gives us an opportunity to reflect upon the work of grace in our lives.  The example of Mary shows us what grace could accomplish in us, if only we co-operate fully with it.  Yes, she was conceived free from original sin but she was, after all, only human, just like us.   All we need do is co-operate faithfully with grace and we will get there, in the end. ________________________ *What’s that?  Doesn’t baptism cancel out original sin?  Good question!  At birth we lacked sanctifying grace and although original sin was wiped out through the first grace we received at baptism, its consequences have, in some way, remained.  Perhaps it’s like a wound that is healed but leaves behind a scar and a weakness.

Of course Advent is the season of waiting, so let’s spend a little time reflecting on the spirituality of waiting. Most people consider waiting a waste of time,’ writes Nouwen. ‘Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, ‘Get going! Do something!’…   For many people, waiting is a dry desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. For us, he continues, ‘waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful… afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are’.

Nouwen then takes the opening chapters of St Luke’s Gospel and shows us that Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon and Anna are all waiting expectantly for the promises made to them to be fulfilled.  Their waiting is not empty (like the waiting at a bus stop) but active.  ‘Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present  to it.’ ‘But there is more.  Waiting is open-ended.  Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something very concrete, for something that we wish to have…  We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes.

For this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended.  Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling the future.  We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen, we are disappointed…  But Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, and Anna were not filled with wishes.  They were filled with hope. Hope is something very different.  Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes.  Therefore, hope is always open-ended’. He shows that at the annunciation, Mary was filled with trust.  She could have no idea of what lay ahead, yet had no desire to control her future.  She trusted and waited hopefully.  ‘To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life.  It is trusting that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings.  It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life.  It is living with the conviction that God molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear…  That indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.’ So for us, let us live Advent actively yet patiently, not succumbing to the retail industry’s inability to live in the present moment.  And let’s let go of our wishes and start hoping.  As Fulton J Sheen said, ‘Get a new center.  Will what God wills and your joy no man shall take from you.’

It’s a courageous move that will turn Advent into an adventure.  I wonder where God will take us?

PS  A quick look on the internet reveals that The Path of Waiting is out of print.  Used copies are available from Amazon but I’d be happy to lend you mine – just ask.  It only has 46 very small pages, and that includes pictures!