Advent: liturgical, personal, a reality of life at various points in life

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This post is printed in full from Interrupting the Silence 

with kind permission of its author, Father Michael Marsh,

and gratitude from Miss Eagle.

“In Those Days….” – A Sermon on Mark 13:24-37, Advent 1B by marshmk The collect and readings for the First Sunday in Advent, Year B, may be found here. The following sermon focuses on Mark 13:24-37. “In those days….” So begins our entry into the Season of Advent. It sounds ominous and it is. Advent is not just a liturgical season of the church year. It is a reality of life. It happens in all sorts of ways. It comes at various points in life, not just the four or five weeks before Christmas. "In those days … the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” These are Jesus words to his disciples. The disciples have been admiring the temple and the large stones. They are impressed. Jesus, however, is telling them that change is coming. The temple of their life is coming down. If you have ever experienced significant change in your life, whether desired or dreaded, you know about “those days.” You know about Advent. You know what it is like to enter the darkness of change. All change, whether welcome or unwanted, brings some kind of loss. It may be the loss of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, the loss of what is comfortable, familiar, safe. Regardless, the world as we have known it has ended. The Advents of our lives set before us important questions. How will we find our way forward when the usual lights that illumined our path no longer shine? What do we do when it feels as if our world is falling apart? Where do we go when it seems as if darkness is our only companion and God is no where to be seen? The dark times of life are threshold moments. The temptation is to do something; to fix it, to ease the pain, to escape the uncertainly, and to get back to what used to be. The God of Advent does not allow that. We can never go back to the way it was before the lights went out. God does not undo our life. God redeems our life. Advent is not so much about the losses as it is about the hope and coming of what will be. That hope and coming is the Son of Man, Jesus the Christ. The presence of Christ is the ultimate answer to every prayer, to every light extinguishing loss, to every Advent of our life. Every time we tell the Advent story of our life we echo the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Is. 64:1 ). And God does. God is faithful. God strengthens us to the end. In the midst of our losses we lack nothing as we await the revealing of Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:7-9). The Advent times of life are times of waiting. They are liminal times. In Advent we live in between what was and what will be. We are neither here nor there. We are betwixt and between. They are times of transition and it is hard, sometimes even impossible, to see the way forward. If we allow them to the dark threshold places of life can draw us deeper into the divine mystery. They remind us that we do not know everything. We do not see all possibilities. We can neither predict nor control anything. We are not in charge. Advent challenges us to give up our usual sources of illumination, to let go of our habitual ways of knowing, and to question our typical ways of seeing. Advent invites us to receive the God who comes to us in the darkness of life. At some point our world falls apart, life changes, or the lights go out. More often than not we see this as the end. When these things happen, Jesus says, remember the fig tree. Read the signs correctly. When its branch becomes tender and it puts forth leaves you know summer is near. So also when the darkness overtakes your life know that the Son of Man is near. Christ’s presence, our healing, and salvation, are always taking place in the dark and messy parts of life. We have not and never will be abandoned to the darkness. “Be alert,” Jesus warns. He commands us to “Keep awake.” Darkness is not our enemy as much as is falling asleep. We fall asleep whenever fear controls or life, when hope gives way to despair, when busyness is equated with goodness, when entitlement replaces thanksgiving, when we choose what is comfortable rather than life-giving. Whenever we think our life is over, that darkness is our final reality, that we have been abandoned, or that loss and darkness are our only reality then we have fallen asleep. To often we allow the darkness to deceive us into believing there is nothing worth waiting or watching for. So we close our eyes. We fall asleep and we become part of the darkness. We refuse to see the One who is always coming to us. The danger in the darkness is that we do not give out eyes time to adjust. We do not trust our night vision. Night vision is not about the light around us but the light that is within us, a light that can never be extinguished. The Advents of our lives ask us to trust the Coming One more than the darkness. It means we must sit, listen, wait, watch. That is contrary to what most of the world believes and what our society rewards. We must show up every moment of our lives not just in spite of but because of the darkness. To show up and be present in the darkness of life is some of the hardest work we will ever do. Run from our darkness and we run from God. In the darkness of Advent we move slower, we listen more than we speak, we hold questions rather than answers. We wait expectantly but without specific expectations. Waiting in darkness is an act of faithfulness and surrender to the Coming One. Waiting becomes our prayer, a prayer that is and will be answered by God’s presence. Tell your Advent story; a story of change, loss, darkness. Then sit down. Be still. Be quiet. Listen. Wait. Watch. These are the practices of Advent. Why? Because God “works for those who wait for him” (Is. 64:4).

Alphabetically - the S words

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The silence and justice of God

Australia has just changed its government. For the last eleven and a half years there have been numerous injustices and cruelties perpetrated by the former government under a bigotted Prime Minister. For many Australians, we have been ashamed. We no longer understood or recognised our nation and so many of our fellow Australians who allowed such ignominy to go unpunished at the ballot box.

When people cry out to the heart of God for justice and yet nothing seems to change, it is very difficult. It is difficult to live through the continuing situation and difficult to understand why there is not a speedy recourse.

We have to remember that we have only a partial view of any situation. God sees the whole picture: past, present, future and personal.

Miss Eagle was not alone in wanting speedy redress, but she also knew that our God - who has a heart of and for justice - would do the job properly. As for Job, I know that our Avenger lives. Last Saturday was reckoning day. Our fellow Australians at last redressed the situation. Not only did our government fall in huge numbers, the Prime Minister became only the second PM to lose his own seat at an election. In short, not only did Australians hold their representatives accountable, they took responsibility for carrying out the task.

One of the interesting things in the election was this. There were a few people on the government side who spoke out for justice. In the main, these people retained their seats in spite of so many losses. There is a lesson in this that needs to be absorbed.

In short, when justice came it did the job well. I only pray that Australians will remain engaged in the political process to hold their representatives accountable. The words of Thomas Merton, below, seemed to speak to the situation under which so many people have had to bear up for so long.

To admit that this is a world to which God seems not to be speaking is not a renunciation of faith: it is a simple acceptance of an existential religious fact. It should not disconcert anyone who knows, from the Bible and the mystics, that the silences of God are also messages with a definite import of their own. And this import is not necessarily reassuring. One thing it may imply, for instance, is a judgment on the self-righteousness of those who trust in themselves because they are fully respectable and "established." It may imply a judgment of their affirmations and suggest that a great deal is being said by God in language that we have not yet learned to decode. Not that there are new dogmas being revealed: but perhaps things that we badly need to know are being told us in new and disconcerting ways. Perhaps they are staring us in the face, and we cannot see them. It is in such situations that the language of prophetism speaks of the "silence of God."
Thomas Merton. "Apologies to an Unbeliever" in Faith and Violence. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968: 211-212.

Into Great Silence: a meditation

On Monday night, I went into the Cinema Nova in Lygon Street, Carlton to see the much awarded Into Great Silence.

Into Great Silence is a documentary. Having said that, though, filmgoers need to be warned. This is not the usual sort of documentary. There is no dialogue. No explanations, no explanatory structure or mechanism. There is no film music. The only music is the Gregorian chant of the Liturgy of the Hours. It is long. 2 hrs 40minutes. The film itself is a meditation with the theatre and its patrons quiet, silent. This is an insight into the life of Carthusian fathers and brothers - arguably the most ascetic order of monks in the whole world - living in Le Grand Chartreuse (yes, they of the famous liqueur - Chartreuse) high in the French Alps near Grenoble. There. Be warned. If you can wear all this and still front up to the theatre, you are almost certain to find this film a positive experience.

The film varies from grainy celluloid style to high quality. Some scenes are great art - to take your breath away and wonder if you are in a movie house or an art gallery. There is an overall structure to the film. It relies on the seasons: winter-spring-summer-autumn-winter as the macro theme. Within that seasonal structure is the daily life of the inhabitants of the monastery: rising and going to choir through to the deep of night office. We see the young and the old: the newcomers and the old, old men. We see the eremetic life lived in the cells and we see the active and practical lives of the brothers who cook, who feed, who garden, who manage the livestock.

We are watching men who have sought the better portion. They have left all, as Jesus commanded, to follow him into a greater reality removed from a world of human made distraction.

An excellent review is here and here is more about the Carthusians which is helpful in dealing with some of queries people have unanswered in the movie. The Anchoress has a review here.

John Garvey, an Orthodox priest, has an interesting piece in the Commonweal of May 18. John saw the movie close to the period of the massacre at Virginia Tech. He threads both together. Here is a quote from his article that I found significant:
A lot of what followed the Virginia Tech massacre was predictable: editorials about gun control and the treatment of mental illness, interviews with people about the need for reaching out. Some students expressed their concern that they may not have done enough to help Cho, though it is not at all clear that they could have. All I can think about are the human extremes here: monks who spend their time in solitary silence before God, listening deeply; and someone weeping in his own howling, desperate isolation, one that turns to evil rage and the destruction of other lives. This is the range of human possibility: you can be a person who moves through silence toward the light, or you can be destroyed by darkness. There is nothing here about morality or moral choices. This is about what we are called to be, and about those things that assist or prevent us from getting there.

As I have said in the title. This film is a meditation. It tells, it displays, an alternative story: an alternative way of being in the world. We may not all enter the cell or live behind a monastery wall but many of us who see this film will resolve once again to be who we are created to be, to serve as we are created to serve, to love as we are created to love, and to live as we are created too live.

Faces - and feet - in the desert

This video, 111 days in the Sahara, comes from Antony Hanson over at Coming to the Quiet.

Australian Research Institute for Desert Spirituality - ARIDS

From Ian Robinson:

May 17-20 VOICE IN THE DESERT .

A national retreat on desert spirituality is to be held actually on the edge of the Australian desert 70km east of Southern Cross, Western Australia.

The official launch of the Australian Research Institute for Desert Spirituality (ARIDS) will be held in the Koora Retreat Centre, hosted by Rev Anna Killigrew and Rev Peter Harrison. Costs are still being finalised, but they will be modest! They include good food, campfire, desert plains, salmon gums, toilets, showers are beds.


We will keep silence. Trisha Watts is our keynote prayer leader. Out of our times of silence will come the sounds of a ‘still small voice’ that she will help us to share and to welcome. Many of you know Trish’s outstanding music and gracious workshop leadership, and you others are in for a treat.


There will also be time for words. Papers on some aspect of Desert Spirituality are hereby called for, and if necessary will be selected by the working group composed of Rev Dr Anna Killigrew, Rev Ian Robinson, and Rev Tracy Spencer. Only a smallish number of papers will be offered.


Access to Koora is via Perth or Kalgoorlie by air, train car or bus. Contact Ian Robinson, at idtr@westnet.com.au, and Ian will help you find share transport.

Picture: Rabbit Proof Fence 25nm to the East of Southern Cross