December 2, 2013
Father Frank Desiano, CSP
Advent has a kind of schizophrenia that disarms us.
It comes at the darkest time of the year, when turned-back clocks only underline the vanishing of the sun well before dinner. Yet Advent points us to the ancient Roman feast of the sun, which early Christians adopted as the feast of God’s eternal light coming into our midst.
It begins with harrowing images of destruction as stark readings from Scripture talk about the end of the world, the destruction of all we know, and the judgment yet to come. But it ends with a sky not filled with falling stars and a darkened sun, but rather angels singing a glory so vast the heavens cannot contain it.
Advent also introduces us to one of the most puzzling figures of the Bible, John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and chomping on grasshoppers. “You brood of vipers,” he calls out to the very people who come to him to ask about repentance. He is kinder to Roman soldiers than to religious leaders who have come to talk to him.
Yet this acerbic prophet gives way to one of the sweetest images in our Scriptures, a young woman engaged to a carpenter, living quietly in her family’s house, now face to face with a heavenly messenger who speaks words of hope and makes almost incomprehensible promises. To the messenger’s greeting, this angel from the highest rank of heaven (that is, from the place closest to divine love), Mary can only say, “I am a servant, a handmaiden. May all happen as the messenger said, and as God will bring to completion.”
The schizophrenia of nature and our Scripture readings find their echo in our lives. Try as we might to make Advent a time of preparation, we find the reality of Christmas stalking us at every moment. The purple of vestments, which speak of waiting, fight the lurid colors of green and red that glare in our stores as soon as the plastic pumpkins were stored away. How can it be a time of preparation, we ask, when Christmas carols blast from every speaker around us? Wait! We want to feel the longing, the distance, the strain of humankind’s longing for hope. Wait! We want to let the strains of Advent chants linger in our ears a little long. Wait! We want a few moments of quiet in winter’s draftiness, with the quiet warmth of our thoughts. But the quiet won’t hold, the stillness won’t settle, the heart won’t calm down.
Churning the desire for some peace and quiet are the demands of the busiest time of the year, when days are gobbled up with shopping and parties, when afternoons are consumed by the sealing of cards and the affixing of stamps. Social demands chomp at our calendar – who to visit, who to call, what to plan for, how to decorate – until Advent seems to disappear, over before it has begun, a wish somewhat unfulfilled, a season cut short.
Perhaps the very tensions of advent, its schizophrenic distractedness, can itself point to a truth we dare not forget. Advent turns this way and that, with so many unresolved demands, but so does the human heart. Advent mirrors the restlessness that generates hopes, the frenetic activity that bespeaks the unresolved dreams of humankind. People are torn this way and that, just like the Advent season. People lurch one way, then another, trying to grasp what they can of life, unable to resolve the competing drives in their hearts. People enact in their hearts and minds the frustration of their quests, how they strive to bring themselves a redemption that only God can give.
So maybe the schizophrenia has a purpose: to show us the futility of all of the running around unless we are, at the bottom of it all, running toward God. Advent mirrors for us the unsettledness of the human heart. It tells us that hopes ultimately have to point to God, that dreams have to veer toward the heavens, and salvation has to come, not from our frantic efforts, but as a gift that only God, and God-made-flesh, can bestow.
Father Frank DeSiano, CSP, is president of Paulist Evangelization Ministries.