Chaos vs harmony

Today’s readings: Jer. 33, 14-16; 1 Thes. 3, 12 – 4,2; Lk 21, 25-28.34-36.

The gospel reading articulates in graphic images the instability and insecurity we all feel inside us. If there is a collective fear in our times and in our hearts which generates illusion and despair, the world needs reassurance of things hoped for. We need to find the inner strength to “stand erect, to hold our heads high”, otherwise there is no point in celebrating what we are about to celebrate in a few weeks’ time.

Talk about promise and fulfillment, or as Jeremiah augurs, about the establishment of “honesty and integrity in the land” could easily turn into clichés. Advent time is surely the time to help us reclaim our true identity, far from being simply naïve and complacent about all that awaits us.

The ruins depicted in Luke’s gospel are perceived in the violent destruction of Jerusalem in the war of the year 70 and in the cosmic chaos.

But the gospel is proclamation of good news, so out of the ruins a salvific presence had to emerge. Jesus himself warns that when these things begin to take place, your liberation is near at hand. History though, as it unfolds, hardly leaves leeway for us to perceive the redeeming factors of whatever comes across. It is these factors that the gospel always points out.

There are different ways of interpreting the “stay awake” of Jesus. It has been commonly translated in terms of being vigilant as regards the individual life so that when death comes our way we are not taken by surprise. But it is basically an invitation for more depth in the life of the spirit. The deeper we go in coming to terms with our identity and with our own self, the greater the grasp of life’s worth and meaningfulness.

It is not the instability of institutions that mainly contributes to our insecurity. Jesus points to the heart as the world within. It is what inhabits the heart that gives us the right or wrong perspective and that can make us reach beyond the shaking of the foundations on which we had our minds at rest for so long.

The tone of this first Sunday of Advent, meant to be the opening of a festive season, is probably not what one would expect. It does not speak of the incarnation beautifully, with angels singing glory and peace to all men. Rather it invokes the fear that we all carry inside and that makes hope difficult to digest.

We have grown up in a world where life and spirit have been mostly separated and now we are experiencing the fractured soul-lessness of the economic and commercial machine that dominates the planet and our very being.

Very intuitively, the gospel today points to the pattern underlying the chaotic complexity of everything. It puts together at one go the cosmic chaos as well as the heart failures we all undergo.

God, creator of heaven and earth and of humanity, meant everything to be in harmony. The loss of this harmony has left a vacuum filled in our lives with rampant commercialism and the globalisation of a financial system which, with all the benefits it generated, has left a trail of social and environmental damage that calls for urgent repair.

What happens in our individual outer life is affected by how we are in our inner self, and vice-versa. The beginning of Advent calls for a holistic approach to our own life, so that we may dwell more on finding the divine spark in us. That should give us a prophetic spirit and the capacity to discern the signs of the times.

Paolo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writes: “For the naïve thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalised ‘today’. For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, for the sake of the continuing humanisation of men.”

God’s promises render futile our dying of fear of whatever threatens the world. In this sense, we are called to be critics rather than naïve, and creators of the world in which we live.