ADVENT ADVENTURE

My Dictionary of Word Origins tells me that advent and adventure come from the same root word in Latin – advenire: to arrive. Adventure originally meant "what comes or happens by chance; luck." By the fourteenth century it took a pessimistic downturn in meaning to "hazardous undertaking."

Sort of gives one pause when contemplating the coming, the arrival of the Advent Season, does it not?  Jesus's arrival, Jesus's coming, which we celebrate on Christmas, certainly did not happen by chance. But it certainly was an adventure, even a hazardous undertaking for him in the end.

When we arrive anywhere, no matter how planned-out our arrival was, no matter how much preparation went into what was to happen upon our arrival, arrivals tend to be adventures. They may not always be hazardous undertakings, but they almost always include much of what comes or happens by chance. A late plane, a flat tire, delayed mail, whatever, can make even the most risk-free occasion hazardous to one's health.

One wonders, then, if the celebration of the Advent Season should be an adventure, a time when we let what happens happen, when we let luck be the lady that guides what we do during this season. Or one wonders if the time becomes simply a hazardous undertaking, a risk-filled time in our lives. One wonders if, in the end, one has a choice as to how the keeping of Advent turns out. And if one does have a choice, which will it be: Advent as come-what-may or Advent as a deliberate undertaking that may be hazardous?

If I have that choice, I think I'll opt for the latter. I'm a very organized person anyway, so perhaps it would be my nature to deliberately choose the dangerous rather than risk whatever might happen. But I am also a person who has this large yellow streak running all the way down my back. Risk is not a large word in my vocabulary.

But I believe that Advent calls us to risk the hazardous rather than let what-will-be be. Advent calls us not to take a chance on Jesus but to risk our lives on following Him. And that can be hazardous to our health as many of the early martyrs discovered, as we have all discovered when we have deliberately given of ourselves to others in love.

Advent calls us to take the time, make the time, to look deeply into what our faith and our life of faith is all about. It asks us to be deliberate about how we use this time and deliberate on how we live out our faith. Jesus became one of us only when the time was right, and not one minute sooner. And everything he did during his life was very deliberate, always after much thought and prayer. The end result was hazardous to his health; but he knew what he was doing.

The same is asked of us during this time of the year. The only way we can know what we are doing as we live out our life of faith is to take the time to reflect on why we are doing what we are doing. It is a risky business, this deliberately following Jesus. We need time to think about that truth. Advent is that time. We need to use it wisely.

YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN

Howard Zinn, the late emeritus political scientist at Boston University and sometime academic radical of the '60s, in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, says this:  "To be helpful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."

He goes on: "What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

"And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an indefinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous thing." It certainly is!

Zinn was Jewish and not especially religious, but what he says, implicitly, is what people of faith are to be about, is it not: “to live now as we think human beings should live”?

The train is moving and yet so many of us try to be neutral about it. The temptation is to want to run and hide. Or it is to throw up our hands in disgust and honestly want no part of it. Yet either way we are missing our calling and we are missing the point.

The world is redeemable, slowly, surely – compassionately, sacrificially, courageously, kindly – by you and by me: one-on-one, one day at a time. If the world is indeed in a mess, it did not get that way overnight. It certainly was not created that way. And it did not just happen. It took a very long time for God's good creation to become as it is. And it is the way it is not because too many were too cruel to one another. It happened because too many turned their backs.

Holocausts don't just happen. Neither do wars. They are the result both of deliberate cruelty and deliberate lack of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. Bad times and bad deeds are always evident. Sin and selfishness are almost always evident. They become worse when good people do nothing.

We are on that moving train and we always have a choice about what we are going to do. Neutrality is not an option. Not to decide is to decide. It is what we decide to do that is ultimately important. We can add to the cruelty by doing nothing or we can be part of its removal, be part of the problem or part of the solution. No, not can: are. We are one or the other. We have a choice about which part but not about being a part.

We're on the moving train. There is only one gear, straight ahead. And there are no brakes, no turning back and no escape. How are we responding?

 

PEOPLE OF THE NO

I saw a cartoon in one of my professional magazines in which the pastor was bending over at the waist peering into the chair well of a desk, saying to the person hiding inside the well under the desk: "Face it, Mrs. Rockford, you're going to have to use the Internet sooner or later.” Sooner or later progress catches up with us. Sooner or later the "tomorrow" we have been putting everything off to finally arrives and becomes an unavoidable "today." Sooner or later.

We are all aware that we should take care of matters sooner rather than later because the longer we delay, the worse the problem becomes. The Internet becomes more and more intimidating and more complicated the longer we delay in learning how to use it. It's called progress. It is also called reality. It’s called life in this rapidly evolving and technological world in which we live.

Unfortunately progress is delayed and reality is avoided by the operative word of so many. That operative word is no. It seems that, to sort of paraphrase the writer of Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for every no under heaven.  That is not to say that a no to a suggestion, a plan, an idea is always wrong. There is a time and a place for no. The problem arises when the first response to every suggestion, every plan, every idea is no -- and the second and third and fourth responses as well.

There are too many People of the No. These people live in fear that a yes will cost them something and live with a belief that a no will be, and is, the easy way out.  They are correct, of course, in the beginning. My house needs some repairs. It will cost me nothing to do nothing. It will cost me a whole lot more somewhere down the line when I finally have to bite the bullet and say yes.

Even People of the No know that. But I suspect that they believe, not that the problem will simply go away, rather, that the problem will outlive them, that they will retire, die or move on before the problem can no longer be avoided. "Mrs. Rockford" probably hopes that if she can say no long enough, if she can hold out a little longer, retirement will be at hand and she will not have to deal with the situation. It will be her successor's problem to bring the office into the 21st century.

People of the No want to make their problem someone else's problem. They want someone else to pay for the solution.  Sometimes they even accuse others of making problems where there are none. They want to know what's wrong with the way we’ve been doing things for years.  And sometimes they say no just to cause problems -- the contrary sort or, perhaps, the power-hungry sort.

People of the Yes often don't like the solutions any more than do their counterparts. Only fools like pain. People of the Yes realize that growth means change and change is always difficult, creatures of habit that we all are by nature. Change is also always somewhat painful, always costly, sooner or later. People of the Yes choose to pay less now rather than more later. They choose the pain upfront. You?

ABUNDANCE

Benedictine Brother David Steindel-Rast, who has studied both Oriental and Western spirituality (in Values and Visions, Vol. 25, No. 2) says this about abundance. "[It]is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over. The smaller we make the vessel of our need...the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight."

One of the unspoken reasons, I believe, why so many are so opposed to allowing Hispanics and other poor immigrants into our country is not that we will have to care for them out of our tax dollars -- an honest reason at best, a very selfish reason at worst -- but that, in many ways, they are a visible reminder of something that we have lost and that gets lost whenever the subject of immigration is brought up. That something is our growing inability to enjoy life in all its simplicity -- and abundance.

We have become a society where the simple life is ridiculed, even if secretly envied. We live in a country where a car, no, two cars; cable on multiple television sets, the latest appliances, a computer and smart phone for everyone in the home are believed to be rights. It would be unthinkable not to have such items in our homes. Yet most of the world thinks every one of these to be luxuries. The only necessities are food and water and some kind of roof -- straw, paper, burlap or tin -- over one's head.

We can't relate and thus we cannot understand. We cannot understand because we don't know when our cup is full and when it runneth over. And as Brother David notes, it is only when our cup runneth over that we find delight. Most of us do not think our cup is full let alone runneth over.

Thus, it becomes difficult for us to enjoy God's good gifts (which is redundant: all God's gifts are good). It does us no good to wish for the simpler life, to wish that we did not seem to need such a large cup to satisfy ourselves. Wishing and hoping don't get very far. They remain, and always will, in the realm of unreality.

What is real is actually using a smaller cup, which means actually being satisfied with less. Perhaps that is what Jesus was alluding to when he lamented on how difficult it is for rich people to enter into the Kingdom -- which means, find happiness, happiness now as well as happiness later. When we never have enough, we are never satisfied and we are never happy.

We may object that it is easy for Brother David to make his observation because he already lives that simple but abundant life. Well, is that not the whole point? We will not know unless we try. That is not to say that we should all run off and join a monastery or convent, although spending a week at one might not be such a bad idea.      

What it is to say is that amid all our riches -- and you and I are very, very rich compared to the rest of the world -- we seem to find great difficulty in finding real pleasure. There seems to be something missing. What is missing is the realization that we already have more than we will ever need. Our cup is already abundant, running over.