There is an old story told about the dilemma of a monkey reaching down through the narrow neck of a glass jar to grab the alluring beads contained within and to which he is irresistably attracted.
In excitement and desire, the monkey grasps a full handful of beads to pull out and possess. But the constriction of the jar’s glass neck means that his clenched fist can only be withdrawn with just one bead held. Any more, alas, and the hand is too full to pass!
If we are the monkey, Advent is the glass jar and the prize we try to grasp is Jesus at Christmas.
Advent presents us with a period of preparation to slim down our preoccupations as we prepare for Christmas.
St John of the Cross, whose Feast Day falls in Advent on 14 December, sets the tone for this refocussing of our preoccupations when he writes:
“In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human successes, but on how well we have loved.”
But loving can be a much harder task than the alternative of fixing. Hence the apparently perpetual temptation for the Church to “fix” the world, if only with ethical and political advice.
The news globally seems relentlessly grim, and more in need of moralistic fixing than ever: weakening economies, threatened ecology, the anarchic unstitching of previous certainties, corruption and deception in public office, violence between States and within their own borders.
With so much crisis, the temptation to offer advice on the vagaries of achieving deeper peace and greater justice can be hard to resist. But when the Church sets out to be politically relevant, it usually fails in anything but the superficialities.
What is gained in public virtue signalling is lost on the scale of spiritual traction. The undulations and traumas that constitute political and secular life are not easily amenable to moral or ethical fixing. Rather they constitute echoes of the disturbed and chaotic human psyche. That’s far trickier to sort.
Advent, approached through the lens of the Gospels, refreshingly brings a degree of relief from the quest for social relevance. In this, St John the Baptist functions in our liturgical commentary to prepare us to welcome Christ.
The words he uses for his challenge to Israel to ready itself to encounter the Messiah apply to us equally now. The arena of the encounter with Jesus is the human heart – not the body politic.
The Gospels describe Jesus as having little interest in the political, economic or ecological world of the first century. Instead of teaching about the symptoms of human disorder and distress in the context of colonial abuse, Jesus launched a programme for the reconfiguration of the human heart.
John the Baptist prepared the ground for this by urging the need for a quest for metanoia, the ancient Greek work that conveys repentance and forgiveness.
Although we translate metanoia as repentance, it is better understood as a mind shift. Essentially it is more of a mental earthquake than a state of just being sorry. It involves a process of shaking and sifting to expose the difference between the ephemeral and deceptive, on the one hand, and the permanent and real, on the other. And following the earthquake, we can experience a re-encounter with God and the experience of the holy.
Holiness is deeply shocking. Not only is its purity terrifying in its inaccessibility, but its demands are overwhelming. Which is why the reaction to the encounter with holiness is always the plea for forgiveness. The gap between what we are created to long for and what we can achieve on our own is too great to be bearable.
Holiness has become more elusive for our contemporaries. The body has replaced the soul as the arena of struggle. The body is now a temple dedicated to health and fitness, with sexuality demoted to functioning as an instrument of autonomy and self-expression.
In our highly eroticised culture, what was once a quest for purity in sexuality has given way to purity in food consumption. Virginity has become replaced by veganism. The purity of the food we eat has been given a higher ethical priority than the purity of our sexual intimacies.
The quest for holiness and purity, however difficult and elusive, remains a critical part of the realignment of the human heart with God. And if Advent offers anything, it is the opportunity to edge towards that alignment.
Advice in general ought to be seldom sought and even more seldom given. But if we were to accept any during this period of the year, it might come best from St John Henry Newman, who charts a path from Advent to the Feast of the Nativity by suggesting:
“If you ask me what you are to do…? I say, first – Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time…”
Photo: A Franciscan monk prays during an early morning Rorate Mass, Bratislava, Slovakia, 17 December 2015. Rorate Mass is traditionally celebrated during Advent, in honour of Holy Mary, and by candlelight during the dark of the morning before sunrise. (Photo credit: VLADIMIR SIMICEK/AFP via Getty Images.)
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