Richard Bollman, SJ

SCRIPTURE COMMENT. December 2, 2007

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

The Scripture today encourages us first to be people of hope,

to expect that God can achieve what we cannot.

That’s the nature of hope: something more is going on around us

than we are in charge of.

ISAIAH: has a vision of God’s intention that takes a social political form.

He describes how God will one day bring people together in a safe place.

Like many visionaries in his tradition,

he thought of this place as a New Jerusalem,

a city on a hill, prominent and attractive.

That’s why there is this reference to the mountain

upon which Jerusalem has been built.

So, as for ourselves, we live always in a time of promise.

The darker our own inclinations, the more we are called to trust.

PAUL: declares that the new activity of God

is what has taken place in Jesus.

We are inclined to miss the power and presence of Jesus

because we’re like people who are asleep,

drugged with all kinds of things, fighting our little battles

and miss what is essential and hidden, Jesus himself.

JESUS: also spoke of the need to wake up.

He pressed this message right before his arrest and execution.

The way he speaks implies that he knows

his death will be an entry into a new relationship with all of us.

He shall come to claim us: will we be available to him?

HOMILY NOTES. 1st Advent A. 2007.

"Setting Out into the Advent Season"

People often comment on our Advent wreath.

Sally and Tom Warner put it together each year:

they practically invented its consistent form,

the way it hangs just above the head.

Always this happens the day before the first Sunday,

so it was yesterday morning,

and our sacristan Patricia Boone had assembled

the lights and the holders (these are lifted from the St. Joseph shrine),

and for years I’ve kept the chain and hooks in a box in my office,

so they don’t get lost,

and the wooden frame underneath the greens, that lives in the basement.

So we get all this out, and then the Warners handle it.

And I spend the morning turning the liturgical pages, as it were:

the icon, the book of readings

(Year A on Sunday now, Year II on weekdays).

The new ORDO book that guide daily and Sunday worship norms.

It’s a lot of fuss work. Nothing profound.

So last night I came up to light the candle,

looking for a little profundity of the season.

I expected to find the chapel in a hush of darkness.

No it wasn’t. The student group, Life after Sunday,

had moved the altar, and covered it with white cloths and candles,

for Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.

The music corner was rearranged again for some music to accompany things;

there was a screen and projector.

My heart sank. In many ways, such nice ways,

verbal and symbolic, I let them know I was upset.

But it’s no time for upset: why get upset over young people’s faith,

and I should have known, it was on the calendar.

So, you light the candle and you go.

So it is, turning toward the Advent of God,

I found myself caught up in what Paul calls "quarreling and jealousies."

My house felt vulnerable to thieves,

but I did not want to wake from that dream.

Preferred my resentments to the truth of how things were.

There it is, the human heart,

burdened with the works of darkness.

So late at night, looking for help, I found an old book.

Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian and spiritual teacher,

speaks of the "rubble-strewn heart."

The notion catches my attention as Advent begins:

the heaviness of the heart, with a few acres of rubble on it.

It’s not just one small disappointment, or one morning’s work.

Rahner says, "human hearts change quietly

and their collapse makes no noise."

Don’t you notice the quiet collapse, in all kinds of things we carry,

pre-season stress, and more profound things we’d rather not notice.

Addictions, resentments, illness and losses, just the boredom of repetition.

Numbness tends to creep up on you:

you do your job and don’t notice the cost.

I think of four funerals in this chapel, shared with many of you:

Paul Ortiz, Bill Greulich, Kevin Gallagher, David Ruhmkorff,

and my sister’s death, where you also shared in prayer and support.

These things you don’t enter into your calendar.

So, I’m not complaining here.

I’m trying to wake up.

What do you do with the accumulation of debris.

Rahner is helpful. This is not a time for heavy lifting.

It’s not a time for defensiveness either: no apologies necessary.

We Christians have this way of getting our act together

to make ourselves feel okay, to avoid the depth of our helplessness,

I think this is our resort to paganism,

what Paul calls here "making provision for the flesh,

to gratify its desires."

Planning, shopping, pleasing people:

this will ease the heart’s burden.

But it doesn’t. It’s just a "disguise for our unbelief."

Advent, instead, is a time to relax the effort of spiritual seeking.

Give up that old God who "keeps you secure from disappointment,

who doesn’t let children cry."

We have to set aside our own plan to find the perfect darkened chapel

and light our perfect candle.

At a certain point we have to let God find us.

And God finds us at home with the rubble, no where else.

Not in our efforts, our substitutes, often not even in our spiritual striving.

But instead in the rubble strewn heart where there is no path or meaning.

God needs no path to this heart: whose immensity already fills it.

Who has been expecting you for quite some time.

This is the urgency I found in that book. The message is of no importance,

but instead actually trying it, giving up our imagined view of ourselves,

giving up even our quiet despair, our unbelief, and instead

accepting the hearts we have,

where God is totally with us right now, silent, nameless, Incomprehensible.

Our own poverty bears this infinity within itself.

There we can begin to speak, our hesitant words,

or let the heart speak for us.

You know, there’s a good Advent movie out there

about the rubble-strewn heart.

Not for the squeamish: it’s called "No Country for Old Men."

A Texas sheriff, one of the old men referred to in the title,

tells the story, about his struggle with harsh events, callous people,

and young folks without mooring.

A rubble-strewn world, and his own heart carrying its failures.

I love this movie, saw it twice, and went to get the book.

Here’s how it ends, with a dream the sheriff has about his father.

"I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground, and [my father] rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

______________________________________

Quotations from

Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, a new translation of "On Prayer," The Liturgical Press, 1997: Collegeville, Minnesota, chapter 1, "Opening our Hearts," pp. 1-13.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, Vintage International, 2005: New York, p. 309.