Advent Is Awareness Time by Fran Salone-Pelletier

Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:12–4:2 5-8; Luke 21:25-28, 34-36; Psalm 25:4-5, 8-9, 10, 14

I have always found the readings for the first Sunday of Advent in Year C to be puzzling ones. They puzzle me because my tendency has always been to categorize dire warnings or pronouncements of tragedy to be Lenten messages; that is the time for pondering life’s realities in light of an inevitable crucifixion! But now? Now we should be asking how we prepare for birth. How do we await the coming of a savior, redeemer, companion, and consoler? Now is a time to look for good news and refute omens of peril.

I suppose I need to look more intently and intensely at the signs of the times. I need to ponder what I am looking for and looking at. I need to examine what I see and then find divinity in all that comes within my view. I also need to expand my outlook, deepening it so that my sight will become insight. I need to see with spiritual eyes. I think we all have those needs.

The horrors of devastation wrought both by human hands and nature’s vengeance are prime examples of signs that speak to us. Both phenomena astonish us with the power of nature. Each resides at the end of a disastrous spectrum: drought and flood, too little water and too much, weaponry beyond comprehension. All cause us to gasp with horror at the swiftness with which our lives as we know them can change, if not end.

People have died during these natural disasters. They likely did not die of fright in anticipation of what was coming. They died in the midst of the occurrences or as a result of them. They died while the powers of heaven shook our earth. Their death brought new life. Death is the vehicle that drives transformation.

These readings cause us to stop and consider death and life. They impel our musing, pondering, and contemplating. They evoke questions more than answers. I ask myself what comprises death. What is the essence of life? What does it mean to be awake, aware, vigilant? What is the difference between expectation and expectancy? Most of all, what has all of this got to do with the season of Advent as preparation for Christmas?

The psalm chosen for this day offers sound advice. We cannot approach a positive response to those questions unless we lift our souls to God. That’s the starting point, the constant measuring stick, the goal—not in sequence but simultaneously. If life is a process in which and by which we lift our souls and raise our spirits to God, we will better see the signs around us as ones which enhance our vigilance and shake the divine power within us into action.

If prayer to God is heartfelt, God’s ways be made know to us. God’s truth will guide and teach us. Only then will we be able to guide and teach each other about the paths of kindness and constancy, about God’s friendship and covenant relationship with us and ours with God. Only then will we be able to read the signs of the times as calls and commands for deepening awareness. Only then will those signs be viewed as opportunities to live a meaningful life.

To understand the readings in that light is to clarify that they are neither disastrous nor destructive for this time of year. They are not charges of catastrophe but calls to commitment. Their challenge is not meant to cast us into immobility nor to coerce us into obedience. The call is to enter more deeply into life, to become ever more aware that we have only this day, this time, to be birthed anew.

Whatever our status quo might be, it is going to be shaken to the core. Each time we allow ourselves to become drowsy, we will be awakened by God. The cause of our condition could be carousing with consumerism or becoming drunk with power, pleasure, prestige, position. It could be the sluggishness that comes when we are overcome with the anxieties of daily life. It could be the listlessness embedded in a “same ole, same ole” existence. The cause does not matter. The effect is equally dramatic, equally devastating.

Advent is awareness time. Advent is the season to “beware” of all that assaults our life with God. It is the time to gift ourselves with immanence more than eminence, to be alert to divinity in all humanity. Advent is the prime time to stop, look, and listen to God signs all around us, deep within us. It’s a challenge, to be sure. It is made even more challenging by a societal push to consume, to buy, to stockpile. “More” is the cry—bigger, better, newer, fancier. We are drowning in those words, and we are simultaneously in a drought because of them.

Is it all bad news, then? I think not. The good news is that we are given the time during this season to look for the signs, to read them, heed them, and know that we need them. The good news is given to us by the prophet Jeremiah: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah. In those days, in that time, I will raise up a just shoot; he shall do what is right and just in the land. In those days, Judah shall be safe and Jerusalem shall dwell secure; this is what they shall call her: ‘The Lord our justice.’” The good news is that we are the recipients of God’s promise, if we only look for the signs.

Advent is about learning to wait. It is about not having to know exactly what is coming tomorrow, only that whatever it might be marks the essence of sanctification for us. Every piece of it, some hard, some uplifting, is sign of the work of God alive in us. We are becoming as we go. I give the final word to Joan Chittister, from her book The Liturgical Year:

Advent relieves us of our commitment to the frenetic in a fast-paced world. It slows us down. It makes us think. It makes us look beyond today to the “great tomorrow” of life. Without Advent, moved only by the race to nowhere that exhausts the world around us, we could be so frantic with trying to consume and control this life that we fail to develop within ourselves a taste for the spirit that does not develop within ourselves a taste for the spirit that does not die and will not slip through our fingers like melted snow.

It is while waiting for the coming of the reign of God, Advent after Advent, that we come to realize that its coming depends on us. What we do will either hasten or slow, sharpen or dim our own commitment to do our part to bring it.

Waiting—that cold, dry period of life when nothing seems to be enough and something else beckons within us—is the grace that Advent comes to bring. It stands before us, within us, pointing to the star for which the wise ones from the East are only icons of ourselves.

We all want something more. Advent asks the question, what is it for which you are spending your life? What is the star you are following now? And where is that star in its present radiance in your life leading you? Is it a place that is really comprehensive enough to equal the breadth of the human soul? ♦

Fran Salone-Pelletier holds a master’s degree in theology. She is the author of a trilogy of scriptural meditations, Awakening to God: The Sunday Readings in Our Lives, in which this reflection originally appeared She is also a religious educator, retreat leader, lecturer, and grandmother of four. Reach her at hope5@atmc.net. A version of this article originally appeared in the Brunswick Beacon.

Image: Michelangelo, The Prophet Jeremiah (from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), 1511.