Available to Christ
Dear Advent Friends:
Advent wreath with all four candles lit.
The four Advent candles are all lit, and the time is near, “Behold, I make all things new.” During these past weeks, we have been challenged to make a connection with our longing, yearning desire to experience the presence of Christ in the concrete circumstances of life. We so easily have a split by believing and being true to the season but not being so able to connect the Mystery of Love with the reality of my life. So, I may be suffering or a bit bewildered and try to work out the details of the issue without begging and inviting Jesus into all the aspects of my life. We are hurting and our first step can often be to manage the situation and develop a plan with no acknowledgement of my need to let Jesus find a place in my home, the home of my heart in particular. Yes, I may find myself believing in an abstract way, and is the presence of Christ far from the reality of my life? An honest struggle for all of us.
A recent article written by Dr. Gary Morson refers to a message from Solzhenitsyn when he was speaking at Harvard: “To counter an ethos of self-indulgence, Westerners need to learn what Solzhenitsyn called “self-limitation.” We need the strength to forego the satisfaction of our desires, and that is possible only if we believe in something higher than ourselves. If man were born only for pleasure, Solzhenitsyn argues as Russian writers often have, then …. man…would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started.”
A very real question as we beg Christ to enter every aspect of our lives: indeed, we desire to leave life a better human being than when we started. The moral growth is riddled with the temptation to live and do life my way. The challenge is to be available as Christ comes knocking on the door of our hearts. We need this disposition of asking: show me your face, Jesus, in all the drama of life and give me the courage to know “self-limitation”, the walk to surrender and open myself to your presence.
Luigi Giussani offers us a conclusion: “Now the question is this: How can this complex, yet simple, this enormously rich experience of the human heart – which is the heart of the human person and, therefore, of nature, the cosmos – how can it become vivid, how can it come alive? How can it become powerful? In the “impact” with the real. The only condition for being truly and faithfully religious, the formula for the journey to the meaning of reality is to live always the real intensely, without preclusion, without negating or forgetting anything. Indeed, it would not be human, that is to say, reasonable, to take our experience at face value, to limit it to just the crest of the wave, without going down to the core of its motion.”
The depth of the journey of Christmas is to walk into the impact with the real as the Shepherds did and be surprised.