Our Biblical Blog /'Examined Life'
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Our Biblical Blog /'Examined Life'
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On the third Sunday of Advent, I would like us to contemplate two images. That of the ‘frozen snow’ and the advent wreath with growing lights. All this in the light of our entrance antiphon, which stands for our third, special light on it: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Indeed, the Lord is near.’ (Phi 4:4-5)
Janos Pilinszky has a captivating image in one of his poems (Vesztőhely télen). When turning the winter landscape into a poetic image. He speaks of the frozen snow as ‘exiled sea’. ‘…And what about the snow, the winter snow? Perhaps, a sea in exile, the silence of God.’ We are the ‘frozen humanity’, immovable, idle, because of our frozenness. Owing to our sins, lack of faith, and now, because of Covid-19, we cannot return to our origins. This origin, as Gaudete Sunday reveals, is rejoicing. The experience of joy, the experience of shared joy, which makes us humans. As we prayed in our opening prayer, ‘O God, wo see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation and to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.’ Our second image, the growing lights of the advent wreath, shift our emphasis to this holy joy. Today we are anticipating it from Christmas Eve. So, Advent feels like a season when God, whom we made silent, because of the distance from Him, suddenly speaks again. Isaiah’s words, with an unsurpassable beauty, show how our God comes to us and covers us with the warmth of his love. ‘Be happy at all times; pray constantly; and for all things give thanks to God…’ (1 Thessalonians 5:16-24) In Isaiah we could fully face the source of this melting, the Sun of Love, our coming Messiah. ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up hearts that are broken; to proclaim liberty to captives, freedom to those in prison; to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord.’ (Isaiah 61:1-2,10-11) But advent does something more. It makes us fertile again, in order to bring that change into the world, which our previous (present) frozenness prevented. This Sunday, in the simplest way, connects us with Jesus’ example. We just need to imitate his acts, his gesture and thoughts. Let us join him in bringing good news to the poor, consolation to the broken hearted, freedom to situations. So, we can see our Advent preparation is yet not finished. How can we sum up our two images? Perhaps, by realising, that Advent is our threshold between our being a ‘frozen see’ and our ‘melting exile’. And today, we were allowed to visit, to have a glimpse, even if for only a day, of the full joy when soon, our Saviour will have been born. 13.12.2020
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Janos Pilinszky has a captivating image in one of his poems (Vesztőhely télen). When surveying a winter scene, he speaks of the snow as ‘exiled sea’. ‘…And what about the snow, the winter snow? Perhaps, a sea in exile, the silence of God.’
We are the ‘frozen humanity’, immovable, idle, because of our frozenness. Owing to our sins, lack of faith, we cannot return to our origins. Advent is feels like a season when God, whom we made silent, because of the distance from Him, suddenly speaks again. Isaiah’s words, with an unsurpassable beauty, show how our God comes to us and covers us with the warmth of his love. ‘I, the Lord, your God, I am holding you by the right hand; I tell you, “Do not be afraid, I will help you.” Do not be afraid, Jacob, poor worm, Israel, puny mite. I will help you, it is the Lord who speaks, the Holy One of Israel is your redeemer.’ We start being melted. Our exile is being melted. But advent does something more. It makes us fertile again, in order to bring that change into the world, which our previous (present) frozenness prevented. ‘I will make rivers well up on barren heights, and fountains in the midst of valleys; turn the wilderness into a lake, and dry ground into waterspring.’ But things are not yet finished. Advent is our threshold between the‘frozen see’ and ‘melting exile’. 10.12.2020 An Overview of Life (Isaiah 40:25-31)
‘To whom could you liken me and who could be my equal?’ says the Holy One. Lift your eyes and look. Who made these stars if not he who drills them like an army, calling each one by name?’ ‘Lift your eyes and look!’ In Advent, we can discover how fundamental it is to ‘have a look at God’. When we stand in front of Him, and spend prime time with him, a crucial mental power develops in us. This is the ability to have a grasp over the complexity of our lives. Without God, in our eyes and hearts, the natural destiniy of things is fragmentation, and focusless diversity. Covid-19, or the climate change makes us realise that we have lost control over the complexities of our world. Sin, illness, incurable conflicts with others, or crisis in life also force us to our knees to admit: we are no longer in control. The very fact that we live an information technology ridden life means that we are bombarded with information. News no longer inform us but deconstruc us every day, and instill the message: you are not in control. You are a splinter of your previous self. That is why our two passages from Isaiah and Matthew’s Gospel bring us the long awaited news. ‘Lift your eyes and look!’ ‘Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’ (Matthew 11:28-30) God’s love makes us whole again. If we recognise the unity which his Presence can create (how we see our life), we can regain our lost confidence. We will feel motivated to face the global and our personal challenges. ‘Lift your eyes and look!’ If only humans could recognise this hidden, game-changer ‘enigma code’, our Coming Saviour. 09.12.2020 In the Collect of the feast we pray: ‘O God, who by the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin prepared a worthy dwelling for your Son, grant, we pray, that, as you preserved her from every stain by virtue of the Death of your Son, which you foresaw, so, through her intercession, we, too, may be cleansed and admitted to your presence. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Today we celebrate the immaculate birth of Mary, the mother of the Saviour. With this birth, God has appointed a new center of the human universe. It is almost like the scientific vision of the ‘Big-Bang’, for us Christians, all moral reflection, examined life, yearning for joy and companionship, repentance, and new beginning all value emerges and returns to this centre. We need this center more than ever. We can expand the above astronomical analogy further. We can envision countless, growing whirlpools of ‘negativity’ in the vast see of history, and our present. These rotating spirals of sin (history unfolding, without making a collective attempt to purify it) pop up around us. It is almost inevitable that one to a smaller or greater extent - is caught up in it. This invisible, random flow of ‘dark-matter’ might explain sudden spiritual or health-struggles. People got injured morally and physically every day. This feast is not a mere symbolic encouragement. We are called to reconnect with, and confess, this real centre of history. It is a gift of gift to be able to perceive it on our spiritual radar. The sad fact is that this ‘star of renewal’ is not (no longer) shown on the radar of our culture. Something blocks it; something blinds us to this ‘white matter’. That’s why, our feast is so profoundly counter-cultural. For it goes against the blind vision of a culture, increasingly burdened with unexamined sin - collective and personal. And the presence of this ‘real dark matter’ is not neutral. It is producing the eyes and minds of denial. When the ‘Sacred’ is not simply refused but treated with hostility. That is why, with Mary, we are called ‘to sing a new song to the Lord’. Mary’s Magnificat is a song of examined life. 08.12.2020 ‘Let the wilderness and the dry-lands exult, let the wasteland rejoice and loom, let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil, let it rejoice and sing for joy.’
Why not compare the season of Advent to aging? Advent is a time to realise that our time for action is shorter than we think. Being suddenly aware of our aging means that we have less life left, shorter with our previous letting time carelessly flow by. Advent is good news. It assures us that there is a reawakening, which can be followed by a recapitulation of the essence of our life. We can regain the lost focus of our plans, dreams, and actions. Still, we can recuperate our vigour. May be not in terms of doing what we missed but reconnecting them with their essence. Prayer and repentance. Strength for prayer, and if possible, for action, will surely follow. 07.12.2020 Advent wants to challenge us on all possible fronts. Today, let us try to answer the paradox echoing in our readings. John Henry Newman, in his 4th Sermon on Advent (‘Shrinking from Christ’s Coming’) brought attention to serious tensions regarding our Advent preparation. There is a mixture of fear and comfort. ‘We are looking out for Christ’s coming, we are bid pray for it; and yet it is to be a time of judgement….How can [we] look forward to it with joy, and not knowing the certainty of [our] own salvation?’ How is it that in our prayers we hasten the Lord’s coming, and at the same time, we are not ready at all? Or to sharpen this paradox further, how can we quicken the arrival of our Judge in parallel with the fact that His arrival would be ‘shortening the the time of our present life, and cut off those precious years given us for conversion, amendment, repentance and sanctification? Is there not an inconsistency in professing to wish our Judge already come when we do not feel ready for Him?’ Why do we need to pray for Christ’s coming?
I would like to highlight two directions in answering this paradox. One is theological, the other is practical. First let us focus on one of Newman’s historical homily, what he says about the importance of our prayer. It is true that it is a discomforting thought to be ‘judged for all our doings by an unerring Judge.’ ‘Try to trace back the history of your life in memory, and fancy every part of it confessed by you in words, put into words before some intimate friend, how great would be your shame!... But how gladly would you in that day [disclose it] to a fellow-sinner, to a world of sinners, compared with the presence of an All-hoy, All-seeing creator. Think of all this, and you will not deny that the thought of standing before Christ is enough to make us tremble.’ But Newman continues with an encouragement. We have reasons to pray to Him, and hasten his coming. God’s presence is hold out to us as our greatest good! Even if we are afraid of this coming meeting, it is our duty to obey on faith. ‘Let us do what He bids, and leave the rest to Him.’ And Newman’s answer gets really exciting on this point. ‘We do not pray that He would simply cult short the world, but that He would make time go quicker… Before He comes all the Saints [his elect] must be gathered in; and each saint must be matured. All we pray is, that He would please to crowd all this into a short space of time, that He would accomplish - not curtail, but fulfil - the circle of his Saints. When then we pray that He would come, we pray also that we may be ready; […] and make us the holier the closer He comes… That when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him.’ We need to take seriously that task of prayer as it is our only way of preparation. Why? Because, as Newman highlights, we can never be fully prepared: ‘you can never be profitable to Him even with the longest life.’ Yet, ‘you can show faith and love in an hour!’ And this is where Newman’s final answer comes. How can we stand before the Lord and God? ‘How do you bring yourself to come before Him now day by day? Consider what it is you mean by praying, and you will see that, at that very time that you are asking for the coming of His kingdom you are anticipating that coming, and accomplishing the thing you fear. When you pray, you come into His presence.’ And though we know that we are of ‘unclean lips and earthly heart’, we also know ‘that He is All-merciful, and that he so sincerely desires my salvation that He has died for me.’ ‘If we have lived, however imperfectly, yet habitually, in His fear, if we trust that His Spirit is in us, then we need not be ashamed before Him.’ That is why our prayer life in the Church is so, so important. In view of this, Newman emphasises the importance of receiving the Holy Communion. ‘For this is in very form an anticipation of His coming, an near presence of Him in earnest of it.’ Jesus offers his friendship through the Communion, he teaches us to look upon him with trust. In the Eucharist we receive we anticipate the future day to come. The second answer to our paradox is thoroughly practical. ‘Prepare a way for the Lord!’ Advent is about reawakening to do and live what Christ teaches. So our advent preparation is about ‘getting real’. Let us make our prayers be substantial and efficient… ‘Think about when you’re working on your weekly schedule. For those of you who don’t have weekly planners or a good app on your phone, opting to juggle it all inside your head instead, you’ll know what I’m talking about: When you consider your work hours, the outing with your friend, your “me-time” watching television and the errand you have to run, somehow it all seems to work. “Yeah, I got this. I’ll squeeze it all in, and have time to take my oldest kid out for ice cream, too.” But then reality happens, and whoops! There’s not enough time. The work hours pile up, something goes on too long, an unexpected emergency comes up, and the ice cream outing is a long-forgotten promise. But if you take the time to speak it out, to put a pen to paper, to use a good working app, and actually go through the week and map out your schedule, you have a good chance at succeeding. Sure, you may have to knock off a few things you were planning to do, but whatever remains on your schedule is now a good bet.’ (Aharon Loschak) Advent also runs the risk of living in our ‘Advent-imagination’. However creative and fertile our ideas of our possible preparation are, these are not year real. All what we dream about are only our ‘thought-kids’. Let us put down real targets and tasks to be done. Let our Advent preparation produce not mere ‘thought-deeds’, but real ones. ‘A voice cries, “Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord. Make a straight highway for our God across the desert. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low!”’ 06.12.2020 ‘In a short time, a very short time, shall Lebanon become fertile land and fertile land turn into forest?’ The prophetic vision of forthcoming events in the Bible has a very strange nature. It is just as much about the future as the past. When we hear of falling empires, the fall of the Holy City, or exile - in the words of the prophet actually past generations also speak. They had experienced these horrors. They want to emphasise, under the surface of the grammatical future, that these sufferings are real. What is going to happen, what is predicted - it already happened. The Biblical future is never a phantasy. It always speaks of what is real.
When we read the prophet’s words, in us, a hidden community is reading and remembering. These ‘future perfects’, that all this will have happened, should strengthen our relationship with past generations. Through the depth of our DNA, it is not only me, the child of the present, but they also speak, hope, and investigate the future. They warn us, who are entrapped in and veiled by the present, that we need to be strengthened by their experiences. We need them, this fellowship created by history, in order to have sufficient desire for the future promised by God. Otherwise there won’t be a way out of our cyber-presence (grammatically ‘cyber-present-perfect’). 04.12.2020 If Advent is the time for waiting for the Lord, then it is about the how of this waiting. Namely, how to reignite our desire for waiting. We live in an age, when there is non contrast between ‘having spiritual energies’ and not having it. These energies have been dissipated in very subtle ways. Our soul’s attention is caught in diverse ways. Actually, we live in a constant state of dispersing our soul’s life.
One perhaps can go even saying, that it is a special form of ‘slave holding society’ regarding these energies. Why? Because in our modern age, based on production and consumption, we need so much of our inner resources that we are (almost) forced to use up those energies of the soul which is reserved solely for prayer. That’s why the pathetic (and cheep) saying that ‘God is dead’ is not true. Our soul is dead. Our sacred, untouchable energies, are exploited and have vanished. That is why it is so important and healing to close this tap of a continuous loss. In the words of Isaiah, ‘Trust in the Lord for ever, for the Lord is the everlasting Rock.’ Advent is a crucial time for recharge. 03.02.2020 Let us pause for a moment and have a look at our ability of ‘waiting for’. This is one of our deepest desires. We can catch ourselves in the act of waiting many times during the day. Today I was ashamed by the fact that after the morning prayers I instinctively wanted the browse the news; what has happened since yesterday. Then I decided to skip that momentarily passion. Indeed, we can live without those moments. Few hours delay with catching up does not really matter.
What matters however is the recognition that we could invest this precious energy into something more focused. For we can wait for the Lord (being Advent) with the same desire. What would happen if we did not waste these sacred energies during the day? What a powerful focusing on what is essential it would be. Our life, down to the tiniest cell of our body, would be literally different. Fuller of life. 02.12.2020 |
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