Thoughts on Advent

What a boring title, no? It's all I could think of at the moment. I'll try to think of a better title for the next piece. I do want to write about Advent tonight.

Advent has long been my favorite liturgical season. A lot of that has to do with the fact that, when I came into the Catholic Church in 1975, the Church was in the liturgical season "Ordinary Time." Think of boring... Rather than baptizing & confirming adults only at the Easter Vigil that year, the parish to which I belonged had continued to baptize & confirm adults at different times during the year, usually at a Sunday Mass. So my baptism & confirmation happened in mid-June. By then, we had gone through Easter Season & Pentecost & had hit Ordinary Time. Of course, people told me that, for a Christian, no time was truly ordinary. Instead, they taught me the difference between chronos and Kairos. Chronos is truly ordinary, whereas Kairos is time touched by G-D & thus transformed.

While that was no doubt true, it seemed that Ordinary Time stretched for a really long time that year. Yes, there were special celebrations: The Feast of the Assumption in August, All Saints' Day & All Souls' Day at the beginning of November & Christ the King at the end. By then, I had grown tired of the unrelieved green liturgical color & was ready for a change.

On the first Sunday of Advent, I walked into a transformed chapel; the purple wall banners, lectern & altar cloths gave the space a rich, deep tone; the priest's stole was the same color. Then, as I stood in the pew, I heard the first strains of a familiar chant-like tune -- familiar not because I'd heard it before in church but because I'd heard it on the soundtrack of Godspell, the off-Broadway play which it opened.

Pre-ee-ee-pare Ye the Way of the Lord --
Pre-ee-ee-pare Ye the Way of the Lord.

A single voice, a capella, began the chant; it was joined by another voice, and then another. The tempo picked up, instruments joined in, &, by the 4th or 5th time 'round, drums & a cymbal supplied percussion in a very up-tempo song sung by the choir & congregation. By the time it ended, I knew well & for certain that we had entered a new liturgical season.

It was during this first Advent season that I began to go from being a new, lone parishioner to meeting people with whom I became close friends &, along the way, a member of the parish. A small group of parishioners offered a Vespers service each Saturday night after the 5 pm Mass, & they invited me to take part in it as a worship leader and chantress. One foggy evening, perhaps a Sunday, three of us drove down to Modesto to visit another friend. On the way back, we realized that thick, heavy tulle fog had developed; we couldn't see to drive, but we didn't want to pull over & wait til the fog lifted. (It might not have lifted until morning!) So, good, still-slightly-pre-Vatican-II Catholics that we were, we each pulled out a rosary & together prayed the rosary all the way back to Berkeley. All of this was a tremendous balm to me, since it had become obvious that my marriage was at the point of total disintegration & the majority of relationships I'd had before I'd converted had fallen apart because I'd become a Catholic. During those very doctrinaire leftist days, it was pretty much impossible for me to say anything that would make sense to my Marxist friends about why I'd made the decision I'd made.

Thus, the Season of Advent brings back some very wonderful memories. In addition, Advent has some of the loveliest readings & music of the liturgical year. More than that, however, is what Advent reminds me to do and to be.

Advent reminds me to be silent. Not 100% silent 100% of the time -- an obvious impossibility -- but more silent than I would normally be. It reminds me to turn off the radio, turn off the iPod to give me the opportunity to listen for the crows in my back yard; for the squirrels scurrying along the sidewalks; for the sounds of the rain, the wind, the sleet, & the snow; for the many different kinds of music, religious & secular, Chanukah & Christmas; and for G-D.

Advent also reminds me to slow down, wait, & be patient. As a person with a disability, I've had to learn to wait & be patient. The buses may not be running on time; the paratransit company may have dispatched a van with a non-working wheelchair lift. Advent reminds me that we are living in sacred time, not regular time. in Kairos, not chronos. It reminds me that there are far more important things on which to focus, for which to wait & be patient, than buses, vans, slow-moving lines in the grocery store, unhappy clerks at the Dept of Motor Vehicles, etc. We've all been there; we've all had those experiences; they could drive us crazy, or we could turn to G-D, perhaps struggling a bit for good humor, & ask G-D to help us.

A few nights ago, I could have used some of that help as I waited for my very nice next-door neighbors to decide to turn the music down or, better yet, end their party & send everyone home. The distraction of the music & noise made it nearly-impossible for me to concentrate. However, instead of becoming impatient & eventually upset, I wondered if perhaps this distraction was G-D's way of calling me to stop what I was doing -- since my living room wall where I was working is on the other side from their living room wall -- save a draft of this piece, go into my bedroom, shut the door most of the way, & read, or spend time stroking & grooming the cats, or pray. Or take a leisurely shower & exfoliate & moisturize my newly-out-of-its-cast right leg.

I guess my point is that we do have choices. The previous day, I had read about Jesuit saint Francis Xavier, one of founder Ignatius Loyola's closest companions & friends. St. Francis Xavier engaged in ministry as a Jesuit even before the Society of Jesus had been officially established. He hoped to go to the Holy Land but ended up going to India and later to Japan to preach, catechize, and baptize people in those countries. Because travel by ship meant frequent delays, sometimes of several months because of weather, winds, currents (to say nothing of politics), St. Francis Xavier & his companions often had long waits before they could leave for their missionary destination.

What struck me as I read about Francis was that, where ever he & his brothers were, once they learned that they couldn't leave right away but would instead have what could be a long wait, right away they began ministering to the poorest, most needy, most marginalized people right where they -- the Jesuits -- were. They visited prisoners, cared for the sick, particularly people with leprosy, visited people in hospitals. He didn't "hang out" while waiting for the weather to change or the tides to become favorable. He immediately & constantly responded actively & positively to the call of G-D, believing that G-D was always present everywhere.

That caused me to begin to wonder how I spent / spend my waiting time, the time in-between, when I've finished one project & not yet begun another; when I'm waiting for a bus or a van; times when I simply have time. I couldn't clearly answer that question so I thought that, over the next couple of weeks, through the rest of Advent, I would track that more intentionally, although not obsessively. Perhaps, I thought, I'll learn something. Then, for circumstances that now escape me, I totally forgot about that idea. On some days, and some nights, my mind acts life a sieve -- the ideas simply run through & out. So I'll try again, beginning later today, the Feast Day of 16th Century Carmelite mystic & theologian Saint John of the Cross.