The Entry of Eternity into Time

In our relation to the ‘God who is to come’ how do we wait?  What is the interior demeanor that is asked of each of us if we are to receive this new manifestation of God’s life within us and in our midst?  With our liturgy we have taken the first step into Advent; we are blessed to have these days to quiet down inside, to listen, to let go, to wait with our deepest longing.

The ancient patristic writers tell us of the ‘three comings’ of the Lord: the first being the historical birth of Jesus; the second is his coming in this, the present of our lives; and the third at the end of time where the Lord will come in glory.  It is always striking to me that the universal Church chooses the apocalyptic gospels in all three of the liturgical cycles to open Advent.  There is one thing for sure that these gospels do and that is to wake us up.  In Luke’s gospel for this First Sunday of Advent we hear: ‘Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life’.  Well if we say I don’t carouse; I don’t get drunk; still I do think we all become drowsy from the anxieties of daily life.  So the Advent call is there: ‘beware’ of this, don’t let it pull you away from the moment of God’s new gift of life for you!

Indubitably the spirit of Advent calls us to interior quiet, to prayer, where in the words of Jean Daniélou, “we must not only deepen certain spiritual attitudes but also affirm our convictions” (Prayer, p.31).  I would say that the most essential spiritual attitude that needs to deepen in this Advent season is a faith-filled waiting.  We already ‘know’ experientially something of ‘the God who is’ and ‘the God who was’; in fact this experienced ‘knowing’ is what anchors our faith and keeps us open to the new ‘gesture’ of God’s love.  A faith-filled waiting, a faith-filled openness leans us into what is to come!  ‘Waiting’, with this level of faith and conviction, overshadows us with expectancy.  It is not a fearful waiting for some possible bad news, but a waiting that brings us back to our ‘yes’, a ‘yes’ that says we need this new birth and we are ready to receive it and to carry the new Christ life fully into our daily lives, no matter the cost involved.

Jean Daniélou further states: “The Christian does not have to break free from time in order to enter eternity…but is rather required to assume a state of waiting for the entry of eternity into time…”(p.33).  Dear sisters, this is the spirit of Advent: the eternal God coming once again into the present history of our lives: the commingling of God and humanity…the Christ of God becoming even more flesh of our flesh…Love becoming more present and expansive in and through each human life, each human life with her tiny seed of faith receiving the gift freely given, the gift of God’s beloved Son.  And ‘the Word was made flesh’…and the Word is still becoming flesh of our flesh.

Let us not lose sight of this Christian reality: the eternal God meets us, encounters us in the present history of our lives.   In this Christmas birth eternity and time unite. Pope Francis in one of his commentaries on the Advent apocalyptic gospels says: “The Gospel does not want to scare us, but to open our horizons to another, greater dimension, one which, on the one hand puts into perspective everyday things, while at the same time making them precious, crucial.  The relationship with the God-who-comes-to-visit-us gives every gesture, every thing a different light, a substance, a symbolic value” (Angelustalk-2016).  This is the outcome of Christ’s new birth in our lives this Christmas: everything becomes fresh and new, touched, overshadowed by the breaking in of God’s eternal gift.  The horizon of our lives will not be the same…they will be expanded…how we see, how we feel will be different….Imagine: the same old stuff being transformed by this birth.

To underline this last point, here is what Pope Francis says: “In this season of Advent, we are called to expand the horizons of our hearts, to be amazed by the life which presents itself each day with newness.  In order to do this, we must learn to not depend on our own certainties, on our own established strategies, because the Lord comes at a time that we do not imagine.  He comes to bring us into a more beautiful and grand dimension” (Angelustalk-2016).  This, sisters, is the ‘entry of eternity into time’, of the Christ life being born in the humble stable of our personal history and the present history of our world.

Listen, Child of God

Ephphatha, be opened.  What opens the ear to hear?  Is it not true that when the heart is open we are able to hear?  Feel into this reality for a moment: when my heart is closed or hardened by harsh judgments, hurt, presumptions, shadow stuff, worries, and you can add to the list, we do not hear.  We hear only our noise.

The voice of God speaks: Ephphatha, be opened.  As the heart opens so does the ear!  If we turn to the Rule, St. Benedict’s teaching is a like a straight arrow in depicting the essence of this reality.  The first word in the Rule is ‘obsculta’, ‘listen’, and this emphasis on one word ‘listen’ is followed in the first sentence with even more emphasis: ‘incline the ear of your heart’.  Here is a dynamic (free) translation of verse 1 of the Rule: 

“Listen, child of God, to the guidance of your teacher.  Attend to the message you hear and make sure that it pierces to your heart, so that you may accept with willing freedom and fulfill by the way you live the directions that come from your loving Father.”  

Attend to the message, make sure the message pierces your heart… make sure you incline or bend the ear of your heart: what is heard with the ear is connected to the heart.  This first verse of the Prologue frames the whole Rule!

If we, right now, were to go outside and listen to the sounds of nature, those sounds would come to our ears pure and unadulterated; the ear connected to the heart would immediately receive these peaceful sounds of nature’s life.  To change experiences, if we begin an ordinary simple conversation with another person this experience gets way more complicated…what we hear stirs up the heart, ours and the person we are conversing with.  We quickly can feel how what we hear has multiple resonances in the heart!  I believe this awareness is important to our ‘listening’, in order to help to deepen our listening both within and without to our neighbor.   This is especially true as we hear the Word of God, which directly touches the many layers of the heart.  The monastic practice of lectio divinacultivates a listening heart; it teaches us how to open interiorly to the Divine voice that speaks to the ‘ear of the heart’: ‘Today, if you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts’ (Psalm 94).

Returning to the Rule, Sr. Aquinata Bockmann says: “Incline or bend always occurs in the Rule in the context of humility” (Perspectives On the Rule of St. Benedict, p.17).  What if in our exchanges with one another we kept this attitude in our awareness: that is, as we receive what the other says we bend the ear of the heart to listen and take in what they are saying.  This interior gesture of inclining or bending to hear keeps the heart open.  Sr. Aquinata adds: “Many might open their physical ears and hear sounds, but if they don’t bend their hearts, they will never experience truth.  Most biblical texts speak of the inclining of the ear…; but they also add that it is the heart to which the Word of God speaks” (p.17). Let me repeat what Sr. Aquinata is saying: we will not experience truth: the truth of ourselves, the truth of the other, the truth of a situation, the truth of God, if we don’t bend the heart to listen!

The heart: the early monastics saw the heart as “the core of the person with its power of loving, but also the power to think” (p.17).  So no wonder our listening must be connected to it!  Fr. Terrance Kardong in his commentary writes the following on this first sentence of the Rule: “The first verse explains the full significance of listening: complete attention of the whole person; good will; implementation. ‘Hearing’ has priority over seeing and activity in both the RB and the Bible” (Benedict’s Rule A Translation and Commentary, p.5).  Here is Fr. Kardong’s translation of verse 1 of the Prologue:

Listen, O my son (daughter), to the teachings of your master, and turn to them with the ear of your heart.  Willingly accept the advice of a devoted father and put it into action.

Listening, hearing is foundational to the monastic way.  Fr. Kardong like Sr. Bockmann lay out this pattern from the one simple verse that opens the Rule: “hear, ponder, implement” (p.7).  We hear and ponder with the heart and implement what we have received as coming from the voice of God.  To incline, to bend the ear of the heart is pivotal to hearing and receiving; otherwise the ego remains king or queen and we hear nothing more than those habitual voices, which form only a very partial view of life.  The voice of our God is much more subtle and silent…it does not shout at the street corners…but speaks as a small still voice.

‘Be opened’: these words of Jesus are addressed to the ear of the heart…the Divine voice cries out daily: ‘Be opened’.   And, then, ‘ponder, implement’.   This simple instruction evangelizes our heart and makes them ready to be an authentic witness and voice of the gospel.  Amen.

Loving with God Love

“What God longs for us to do is to live in the truth Jesus reveals.  This means believing in God’s absolute, unconditional love, not in a notional way but one that transforms our attitudes and whole approach to life” (Essence of Prayer, p.51-52).  These words of the Carmelite Ruth Burrows would delight St. Bernard whose feast we celebrate tomorrow.  Bernard was the great teacher of ‘love’.  Whatever book we pick up with his teaching will be laced with the reality of God’s unconditional love revealed, embodied in Jesus.   

What Sr. Ruth is saying is radical in this sense:  by ‘believing in’, meaning living into, God’s unconditional love, this will ‘transform our attitudes and whole approach to life’.  And surely we all are in need of this attitudinal transformation!  We can ask our selves what are those attitudes, which I get taken by, that need to be transformed?  Just observe my attitude towards a sister I have difficulty with. Or, observe interiorly my murmuring heart, or the harsh criticisms that come up towards others…Are we not being taken by those same negative, judgmental attitudes of the Pharisees whom Jesus faced on a regular basis?  Love is obscured when we are overcome by this judgmental, ‘better than thou’ attitude. In fact the larger horizon of God’s love and mercy is all reduced if not lost in the moment…our hearts shrink into an ego-serving mode of being!  Let us not forget: we love with God’s love…and when we do this, our love is free of any ego claims or expectations…it is a love that freely pours itself out for the sake of God and our neighbor.

Ruth Burrows continues: “What can be more important for a disciple than constantly to reflect on the truth of God, on this unspeakable, incredible love with which we are encompassed? But how often do we do this?” (p.52).  Ok: so let us honestly look at how often we reflect on God’s love for us, a love that is constant and unconditional?  Why is this so important?  We love with God’s love.  When we get a taste of God’s love what does it do within us?  Imagine our lives without a felt knowing in heart and soul of God’s love for us.  Imagine a life in which we are not loving the ‘other’:  God, and all those ‘others’ who we live with and who cross our path. Here are Bernard’s evocative words: “The capacity of any person’s soul is judged by the amount of love he or she possesses.  Hence she who loves much is great; she who loves a little is small; she who has not love is nothing.  As Paul said: ‘If I have not love, I am nothing’” (The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux, p.106).  The choice is ours:  will our loving be ‘small’ or will it be ‘great’ in the sight of God?

I was thinking that when Jesus prayed ‘your will not mine’, that it was motivated by unconditional love. This prayer is a profound exchange of love between Father and Son.  Perhaps we need to pray each day, ‘your will not mine’ for this prayer places us in the landscape of the One who loves us and as pray these words we are offering our love, ‘your will O God, not mine’.  As we come to know God’s love we want to give our all in return!  In his book The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux, John Sommerfeldt writes: “Bernard asks the obvious question: “‘What can I give to God in return for himself? Even if I could give God myself a thousand times, what am I to God?’  Bernard’s answer is that one should love God with all one’s heart. However, inadequate a response this is, it is all that is expected” (p.113).  What is being asked of each of us is possible.  It is as simple as this:  to know in heart, soul, mind, and body God’s constant love for us, a love that encompasses us always whether we ‘feel’ it or not.  And if we are in a dry spell where we do not sense this presence of love, we still have our anchor of faith.  A living faith reminds us of those moments in the past where we had a palatable sense of this love.  Memory in the patristic writings brings an experience of the past into the present moment, where that experienced memory becomes fresh, new, sustaining.  In the same vein, Bernard speaks of the ‘book of our experience’ (Song of Songs I, p.16)).  This book of experience will not let us forget the encompassing love of God. With Jesus at the center of our lives the way into God’s immense love is opened up for us…As we listen to him, as we follow him we will be met by Love, the Love that will continue to ‘transform our attitudes and approach to life’ so that we, in turn, will be vessels of God’s healing and transforming love.

I conclude with these striking words of Jean Vanier that we heard at vigil: “Transfigured by the Word made flesh our flesh becomes a gentle instrument of the love of God to flow in others” (Jesus The Gift of Love, p.172-173).

First Sunday of Advent 2017 - Awakening the Spark Within Us

‘Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not’?  This is how Advent opens with the first reading from Isaiah (63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7).  Left to our selves we wander from the ways of God, our hearts become hardened almost unnoticed because we are living without much awareness of what is happening inside, within the heart.  Once we become aware and notice more, we may feel moved to cry out, ‘Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down’…or simply, ‘Oh that you would come to change my heart’.

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

The reading continues with this plea:  ‘Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways!’  And then this finale which has all the elements of a song of longing – ‘You O Lord are our father’: meaning, you are our Source, you are our Creator: we are the clay, which is a humble posture of acknowledgement and awareness of who can shape us anew – we are the clay and you, our Creator, the potter.  Finally the Isaiah reading concludes with this existential reminder: ‘We are all the work of your hands’.

So here dear sisters we have our entrance into Advent…does more even need to be said?  Jean Daniélou wrote: “To talk about Advent implies that someone or something is coming or will come.  The liturgical time of Advent is a waiting for divine action, a waiting for God’s gesture toward us” (Prayer, p.32).  And how are we to wait?  The gospel tells us to be awake, watchful.   I wonder if the beginning of Advent awakens a little spark within us.   Have you noticed a small, quiet stirring, a movement of anticipation that we each need to stay close to?  Already just the word ‘Advent’ stirs our hope, our longing.  This stirring already knows before we even do (!) that more of God is coming into our lives…God will not disappoint!  But let us remember it begins small: in ways that we can easily miss, so we are to attend with the ‘ear of the heart’, listen for those silent movements of the Spirit…we are being over-shadowed by the One who seeks us, who seeks to grace us with new life, with His life.

Pope Francis, in his 2014 homily for the First Sunday of Advent, offers insight into how we are to wait and be watchful.  He says that this eschatological gospel is not trying to frighten us but is “‘to open our horizons’ to further dimensions, giving meaning even to everyday occurrences.  This perspective is also an invitation to ‘sobriety, to not be dominated by the things of this world’ but rather to keep them in their proper place”.  Is this not why the beginning of Advent calls us to turn inward, to be vigilant and watchful?  This new moment of God’s manifestation is for each one of us.  It is so important for us to receive this gift of new life, for how are we to incarnate Christ’s life if we do not first become receptive vessels, like Mary, of this newness wanting to birth forth? 

We all need change; any true change in our lives must have its root within otherwise it lacks the solid rock on which our house is to be built.  This is what this Divine birth can and will bring to each one of us.  Pope Francis says in the same homily: “‘We are called to enlarge the horizons of our hearts, to be surprised by the life that is presented each day with its newness.  In order to do this we need to learn to not depend on our own securities, our own established plans.’”  To be bearers of the Divine gift means we can only receive this grace if our posture is open and attentive, open that is to changing our ways, even a small movement of change makes us ready bearers of this new life that is to be ‘given to us and for us’.  During this short Advent season, let us ponder:  in what way or ways do the boundaries of my heart need to be enlarged?  What small change do I need to be ready to receive God’s new gesture of grace?  Just the honest intention of praying for change brings the Coming One close, very close indeed.

A prayer:  Oh you the Potter, you who shape and form us into a vessel worthy and humble enough to bear your life, come enlarge my heart, soften its hard edges, prepare it for your new ‘gesture’ of love.  Grant me a living faith that knows you will not disappoint me in my desire.  Amen.

Sr Kathy DeVico, Abbess