November 26, 2004
Watch
Advent 1A Mt 24.37-44
Jesus said, “Watch… for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
“Watch.” Look outside. Look for the signs. To understand the times, sense the seasons and their impact on life, to understand this moment and how it fits into all other moments, watch.
Look at events that don’t necessarily spring from ourselves. When we vow in our Baptismal Covenant to seek Christ in all persons it means to look everywhere for the hand of God. Watch.
To understand our lives, we must see other lives. To understand events, we must see the ways those events impact other people. To understand our children, we must see and listen to them. To understand our spouses, we must step outside the shelters of our desires, our perceptions, our feelings and see how life unfurls in another.
“Dying to self” may have become so trite a phrase that we overlook how complex and difficult a process it is. Yet it is the very pathway to God and to God’s perspective. It means stepping away from self-reference, from self-determination, from self-expression, not because they are wrong, but because their horizons are too limited. It means that the gospel message is not to teach us how to live, but to teach us how to die.
If we see life only from the vantage of self, we become blind. We hurt others even if we want only to love them. We diminish ourselves. We trespass on community. We turn away from God. Before we know it, we become parched and sterile.
But having looked, would we do anything differently? When it comes to planning our days, most of us don’t tend to have a lot of discretionary, perspective time. Besides, the point is not so much what is done, but the manner in which we do it, the way we come and go, stay and return.
This Advent season begins another year, another journey which recalls us to the rich tradition and heritage from which we come and in which, as it goes, we have a share in the making. Advent is a fork in the road. Yogi Berra’s wise counsel is to “take it.”
But there is more to our lives than putting one foot in front of the other. We talk as we go, we laugh and cry, we take another’s hand, we listen to another’s story. We honor their journey, a journey that is never parallel to ours, but always intersecting.
In God’s economy, all of life is connected in a way that we can neither create nor stop. So far as we know, maybe we are the only part of life with self-consciousness. Someone said that human beings are “so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.” The commitment to be aware of this and to see it as it is remains an essential part of our being, our privilege, our responsibility, our vocation.