The Joy of Becoming
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December 14, 2019On Gaudete Sunday, the Church continues the series of first readings from the prophet Isaiah which overwhelm us with consolation, and offers us the vision of a desert blossoming into a garden:
“The desert and the parched land will exult;
the steppe will rejoice and bloom.
They will bloom with abundant flowers,
and rejoice with joyful song.” (Is 35:1-2)
What is the meaning of this? The desert stands for all that separates the people from their land, from the place where they are meant to be. This passage calls on Israel’s foundational story of the exodus from Egypt, the forty-year sojourn in the desert on the way to the Promised Land, and applies it to the circumstances of Israel at the time of the exile. The application works because again we have a place where we want to be – home – and a place where we find ourselves but don’t want to be – Egypt/exile – and a process which lies before us, a difficult path, a way through the desert. The flowering of the desert is Isaiah’s way of expressing God’s proactive movement into the place where his people languish, separated from him by their fear and infirmity. The blossoming is the glory of God revealed in his people, in the strengthening of feeble hands and weak knees, the grounding of a fluttering heart in firmness, and the healing of all that stands in the way of the journey, whether it be some form of blindness, deafness, lameness or muteness. The choice of this passage as a liturgical reading implies another application, to the situation of God’s people awaiting the coming of Christ, both before his birth in Bethlehem, and in the ongoing “now” of the Church awaiting the Second Coming. In his Incarnation, God stepped irrevocably into the breach, and humanity blossomed. This is the source of our joy.
An example that springs to mind as we hear of infirmities healed and lepers cleansed, is that of St Damian of Molokai. We saw a film of his life a few years back and I remember being so struck by the scenes in which he preached to his people, addressing them as “my fellow lepers,” something that would become literally true when he caught the disease himself. They would listen to the gospel stories about Jesus cleansing lepers and would rejoice and sing and dance because God drew near to his lepers in love. But wait a minute – Jesus cleansed lepers, and yet none of the lepers on Molokai was cured, not one! So how could they rejoice? How come they didn’t receive the gospel as a slap in the face, because Jesus came and did his thing, but they are still living and dying as lepers? Their joy was in the Lord who drew near and stepped into the desert that separates us from our home and transformed the landscape. The desert blooms within when people find their fear and infirmity healed by the coming of the Lord. The leprosy of the inner person is healed when someone is touched with reverence and given hope. The miracle of Molokai was that lepers could learn to live happily as children of God in expectation of a coming fulfillment. This is the miracle we are all being offered.
The second reading from the Letter of James takes us from the blossoming of the garden, back a step, to the work of the farmer:
“See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.” (Jas 5:7-8)
This word speaks to me of the process of becoming in which we are all involved. If we believe that God created and redeemed and called us for a purpose, then our life has a goal and we are on the way home. If we believe in the fruits that God plans to bring about in our lives, even though we may not see them yet, we can relax a bit and rejoice. We have heard about the need for prudent use of the plowshare and the pruning hook during these days of waiting, to cultivate the earth of our hearts, our lives, our community, our human situation in the world. This is our part, our labor, both interior and exterior, in becoming the persons God intends us to be. But then there are the factors that lie outside our control. The rain. Without rain, all the labor of the farmer comes to nothing. Without God’s rain, no salvation can bud forth from our roots. We must wait for the rain. And yet rainy days can be a real drag, can’t they? When we look out the window and see nothing but grey dampness, our spiritual élan is also dampened, and we may be tempted to discouragement, to believe that we are stuck very far away from our goal. But it isn’t true! Something is always happening beneath the surface of the earth. God’s rain is nourishing us. Our becoming is in his hands.
Another example comes from the time when I was taking dance classes. In one class, the teacher would demonstrate a sequence and then, instead of letting us just follow the crowd in comfortable anonymity, he would ask us to rehearse the sequence three by three, in front of everyone. How embarrassing! I wasn’t even sure I could remember the steps, and yet I was expected to jump right in. As I was hanging around at the back, all feeble hands and weak knees, one of the women in the class came up to me and said, very simply: “You have to trust the process.” We hear this phrase today: trust the process. It is a way of saying that sometimes you have to take the next step even when you don’t feel confident, even when you think you’re going to fail, because without that step, the process cannot go on, and there will be no way to get to the goal. Without making the effort to move my feet, without taking the risk of looking foolish, without being willing to live with my lack of skill, I will never become a dancer. Becoming requires effort, risk, and a capacity for waiting in a state of incompletion.
Finally, we find ourselves before the gospel, where we see John in his prison cell, staring at the wall, wondering what his life is about. All of a sudden, his intense missionary activity for the kingdom is brought to an end in a whitewashed room. All he hears is echoes in his own head of the words, events and encounters from the time when he was preaching the coming of the Messiah. Was it all for nothing? Was I deluded in my expectation? Who am I? And who is this Messiah? “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” (Mt 11:3). We find ourselves in such a cell sometimes, circumstances having brought us to an unwanted solitude in which we face a blank wall, wondering whether our life, our efforts and we ourselves are a big mistake. It can happen after a period of intense effort and activity, such as the preparations for Christmas or some other great event that becomes a focus and goal of our striving. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in the day after – the day after Christmas, the day after Solemn Profession, the day after my last day at work, the day after the funeral. Expectations collapse and we are left with nothing but questions echoing in the silence of our hearts. What now? “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” (Mt 11:3).
Jesus’ answer to John comes to him not immediately, but by hearsay:
“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.” (Mt 11:4-5)
John does not see it himself, but he is being told that the desert has blossomed, God has set foot in humanity’s soil, heaven has dropped down rain and the earth has borne fruit. The evidence is in the people – they see, they can walk, they are cleansed, they hear, they are brought to life, they receive good news. We, like John, need to receive this word for joy to sprout in our lives. Sometimes we are able to see for ourselves the fruits of God’s redemption in our life and in those around us. At other times we need to receive it without seeing; we have to believe the word of another – the word of Christ, the word of the Church, the word of someone sent into my life. This is what Advent is for: to give us words to remind us of what God is preparing in secret, to direct our attention to the mysterious process of becoming, and to sow joy in our lives. I would like to close with a word I received this Advent – a prayer of the Jesuit scholar and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ