FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
29 NOVEMBER 2020
The
Prophet Isaiah expresses the frustrations of his people in today’s first
reading. They had just returned to their
homeland after fifty years of captivity in Babylon. Instead of finding a familiar environment,
they find incredible devastation and huge frustrations in rebuilding the temple
and Jerusalem. He acknowledges that they
had sinned and deserved punishment. But
it seems that God has hidden his face in their darkness. The prophet begs God to “…rend the heavens
and come down, with the mountains quaking before you…”
It is easy
to identify with Isaiah’s frustration in the midst of our current
darkness. The pandemic continues to rage
and disrupt our lives, and we see no foreseeable end to it. There are bitter divisions in our nation, in
our Church, and even in our families.
Civil unrest continues to threaten our peace. Everyone is on edge. We might wonder where God is in all of this. Is God paying attention? Why doesn’t God give some tangible signs of
his presence in this mess?
Many saints
and mystics have asked this same question.
Even Saint Teresa of Calcutta, known for her faith and care for the
poorest of God’s people, asked that question.
In her journal published after her death, she speaks of a spiritual
loneliness. She wrote of bearing a
“terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not
really existing.”
That is why
we need this Season of Advent so badly.
Advent prepares us to celebrate the reality that God has already rent
the heavens and come down. God did not
part the seas and rend the mountains as he had done in the Exodus and at Mount
Sinai. God has rent the heavens in the
most intimate of ways – in a small town in Israel, through a young couple who
could not find a place to give birth to their child. God shows up, not with thunder and lightning,
but in starlight. God appears not as a
warrior king, but as a child who is vulnerable and poor.
Advent
prepares us to celebrate this first coming at Christmas and renew our faith
that God has not abandoned us. But
Advent also challenges us to prepare for the Lord’s second coming at the end of
the world and at the end of our lives.
Because we cannot know when that second coming will occur, Jesus insists
that the best way to prepare is to be watchful.
His first disciples failed to be watchful when they fell asleep during
his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.
That trial has remained with the Church ever since.
If we
remain watchful, we can peer through the darkness and gloom to see signs of his
presence now. We can listen carefully to
his Words in Scripture. We can reaffirm
our faith that he is truly present in the Eucharist. Each of us has our own work, our own
ministry, which takes us beyond ourselves and our own fears to serve the needs
of others. In those sacrificial actions
of love, we can recognize the reality of our true identity when we participate
in the Eucharist: Christ’s Body present
in the darkness of our times.
Perhaps the
best way to be watchful is to spend more time in personal prayer. We are invited to renew our Stewardship of
Prayer during Advent as a way to heighten our need to stay awake and be
watchful. Please listen to Jess Kimmet,
as she speaks of her own life of prayer and how it has affected her life, her
marriage, and her children.
Witness Talk: Stewardship of Prayer
St. Pius X—Advent 2020
Jessica Kimmet
Hello, friends! My name is Jess
Kimmet. I’ve been married to Mark for six years and we have two kids so far:
Marty is four and Lucas is almost two. I’m so grateful to be able to talk to
you a little today about stewardship of prayer and how my own faith has grown
through my imperfect but ongoing attempts to pray.
Since becoming a parishioner at St.
Pius, I’ve been really struck at how the parish approaches stewardship as a
holistic way of life and an identity we can grow into. Stewardship is our
response of gratitude to the many gifts God is always giving us. As good
stewards, we strive to give a first fruits gift back to God. When we’re talking
about stewardship of prayer, that’s a gift of time, but is maybe even more a
gift of attention. Our attention is so fragmented and splintered by the way our
culture demands we live our lives, and any time we can focus on another person without
distraction we are giving them a great gift. This is true of God, too!
Now, I’m not very good at this! I’m
a task-oriented person who loves checking things off a to-do list, and simply
giving my attention to someone never feels like much of an accomplishment. It’s
something I’m working on being more patient with in all my relationships, and
especially in my relationship with God, who does not normally demand my
attention in the loud and insistent ways my children might, but rather gently
invites it and patiently waits for me to respond.
And even though I don’t feel like
I’m good at it, I do keep trying to respond, and my response looks really
different as I move through the different seasons of my life. Before I had
kids, I loved to pray with the Liturgy of the Hours, setting aside specific
times and getting out my fancy book with the ribbons and flipping back and
forth through the complexities of praying the Psalms with the Church. After
having kids, I rarely find myself with enough free hands to handle all those
ribbons, so I’ve found myself returning a lot more to memorized prayer, praying
the rosary a lot more, sometimes counting my Hail Marys on the toes of the baby
I’m nursing. The pandemic threw another wrench into my prayer life as it
derailed all of our routines; but I’ve been finding a lot of joy in
intercessory prayer, praying for the specific needs of others as a way of
staying connected during this time of social distancing.
In my mind, a “successful” prayer
life looks like having a regular time and place for prayer, but this season of
having little kids means that the needs in my house are frequently changing, so
my best times for prayer are constantly shuffling. I used to see this as a
failure, but I’ve come to see it as an opportunity. It calls for flexibility
and creativity and a little bit of stubbornness on my part, and God is always
there waiting when I sort it back out again. Through all these changes, I’ve
been really grateful for a class on prayer that I got to take my junior year of
high school. It gave me the opportunity to explore a lot of different types of
prayer, so I have this toolbox to pull from when things need to change. The
monthly prayer challenges St. Pius is providing during this parish Year of
Prayer are another great opportunity
Another big challenge for my prayer
life was when I had postpartum depression last year. I couldn’t find the energy
to do much more than go through the motions of anything; but I want to put in a
plug here for going through the motions. I don’t feel super in love with my
husband every day, but I still act like I’m married. It’s in the choice to act
lovingly that love transcends the fickleness of our human emotions and becomes
a virtue, something we can practice and get better at. Prayer isn’t always
emotionally gratifying; it doesn’t always make me feel good. God doesn’t always
show up in the ways I would have chosen, with the highs of a retreat or the
consolations I was looking for. But I keep showing up, even if imperfectly or
irregularly or distractedly. And the gift is that God shows up, too, always,
and turning my attention to God with whatever regularity I can muster helps me
learn to see God in places I didn’t expect.
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