2nd Sun in Advent • Malachi 3:1–4 • Philippians 1:3–11 • Luke 3:1–6 • 12/8/24
Where I grew up in California, the mountains were glorious. Intriguingly crooked mountain roads went winding between spectacular rocky heights and wooded valleys that seemed to offer endless solace. So, I’ve struggled with this quotation; it conjures images of leveling tracts for malls and parking lots where craggy forests and high, hidden lakes once freshened the air and spoke of awe and adventure.
Yet awe and adventure are afoot in these readings. The Holy One who delights us is on the way. We are to prepare a path, and the obstacles “shall” be cleared.
How should we think of this promised clearing? Here in the wintry Midwest, to allow the holy Guest to drive right up to the door, shall the divine snowblower come and clear the driveway for us? But if it’s done for us, why are we told to prepare the way? And if the preparations are up to us, then why say the obstacles “shall be” cleared?
I think this is one of the paradoxes of the life of faith. There is something essential for us to do, but it’s more than we can accomplish alone. Instead, there is One who takes the small spark of our efforts and blows it into flame—flame that can burn like a refiner’s fire, all the way through whatever separates us, or seems to separate us, from the Holy One. What the mountains and valleys represent is the geography of that felt separation. And that geography is in our hearts.
What is the nature of this inner geography? When I look at mine, I see a wide gulley of fearful clinging…hillocks of resentment, grudges, and judgments… and scattered rockpiles of activities that I use to tune out intense feelings and perceptions. And that’s just the part I can see. Part of our human nature is to hide these sorts of inner obstacles from ourselves. We do it very well.
I’ve learned over the years not to tackle all this with a bulldozer. An impatient, frontal approach always seems to catalyze an equal and opposite eruption by previously unsuspected layers of myself that stubbornly escape my control. In the end, the gulleys and hills just get bigger.
The remedy to this paradox is itself paradoxical. In the words of Elaine Prevallet:
We have to acknowledge that we can’t do it… one can… only approach from the back door… We depend upon the grace of God for … the painful revelation as life unmasks us before our own view. …And yet, without attempts… there would never be occasion and readiness for the graced revelation that shows me, yet more deeply, who and how I really am. …this is the only way the inside of the cup is cleansed. The revelation is the moment of healing if we realize that we cannot, by all our effort and struggle, heal ourselves—and need not. We need only surrender ourselves to be re-fashioned in the infinite tenderness and mercy of God.
I don’t claim to understand how this refashioning works, but I know it does. Sometimes, I think once we truly see what we’ve been doing or thinking, we can’t go on the same way anymore. Other times, I think the process is more gradual. For now, I want to explore the idea that “life unmasks us before our own view.” It reminds me of a strand in the Benedictine tapestry.
Benedict describes our life in this world as a paradoxical ladder which we ascend by humbling ourselves. We begin by relinquishing successive levels of willfulness, bowing first to God’s will (in two steps) and then to the will of someone with legitimate authority over us. At the fourth level, we learn to accept whatever happens to us, even if it’s unjust and contrary to our nature.
This is certainly countercultural, and we should interpret it with care to avoid condoning abuse. Nor would I want to oppose resistance to injustice. Still, there is a kind of acceptance that can occur when we recognize that life has unmasked our attachment to something other than God. This kind of attachment is one of those mountains or valleys separating us from the experience of full communion with the Holy One. Life has inconveniently but graciously given us an opportunity to release one of the idols we’ve clung to.
Acceptance in this sense is a spiritual discipline that can indeed soften us like refiner’s fire and reshape us, opening us to new expressions of God’s will. Though our active consent is required, we can’t do this for ourselves or by ourselves. Perhaps this is what Joan Chittister means when she says it’s unwilled change that lasts.
It might be too much to bear if unwilled life changes confronted us with every last one of our idols. Luckily, the fifth step of Benedict’s ladder offers an alternative: opening our inner hills and valleys, the inside of the cup, our hidden thoughts and actions, to the view of one we trust. In this way we acknowledge our inner bumps and potholes before God and in our own eyes: here an impatience or a reluctance to listen to someone, there an insistence on my own way… Often this is enough to start the process of repair.
We never come to the end of this resurfacing process. Our earthy earthly path regularly incurs new bumps and potholes. New stresses evoke new reactions and defenses, some of which become entrenched. So, the alternating seasons of winter and road construction find an echo in the liturgical year, with its Advents and Lents. For enthusiasts like Saint Benedict, whose monastics pledge continual conversion of their ways, the season goes on all year long: ideally, he says, monastics should live as if always observing Lent. Still, he immediately admits that “few are capable of this.” For most of us, as Steve suggested last week, the invitation is simply to start over.
Whatever the seasons of our internal road construction, today’s readings call us to open our inner driveways to the holy snowblower, baring the bumps and potholes of our souls to make way for the Guest who is closer than our very self and yet needs to be allowed in. In the fullness of time, every bump shall be brought low, every pothole shall be filled, and the Holy One whom we seek, the One in whom we delight, shall find easy entry into our hearts.
Comments 1
I am glad I could read this.