Alert, Aware, Attentive: Advent Reflections

By John Cullen

We often find it hard to believe that we have a unique voice. Advent begins with a voice crying in the wilderness. Every voice matters – especially voices in the wilderness that are stifled and silenced by alienation and apathy. This book dares you to take the time to listen to Advent voices in the wilderness that persist with calls to be heard and respected.

December is a month when we fill the winter days and nights with a new busyness. This book is a chance to pause, catch our breath.This book is a fingertip on the pulse to appreciate our every breath and heartbeat as a gift. It is a chance for the reader to connect with God’s word during Advent – cradling a word, a phrase or an image that whispers hope into some parched place in our lives – a place of dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14). This is where God’s patient dialogue waits for our response.

The author celebrates God’s love enfolding all that we hide – just as Adam and Eve hid their own natural beauty (Genesis 3:7) – unaware of God’s ‘hide and seek’ presence. Here is a God, eager to guide them and us from shadowy darkness into a perpetual light of eternal love.

Advent gives us the space to create new contexts that transform predictability into possibility, despite our inadequacies and the freight of failures that we carry. Advent is a time to develop skills as disciples, so as not to miss God. Advent is about being disciples. The gospels show us how the disciples stumbled, fumbled and slowly and gradually learned to change, follow and witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788122894

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

We all have memories that are vivid and have an impact on us. One haunting memory I have is of a routine walk through a school playground; a child asked me, ‘Father, can I ask you a question?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course, anything’. Then he asked me, ‘Is it true that Santa Claus is not real?’ I side-stepped the question, but I could see in his eyes that he was determined to get an answer. I explained about Saint Nicholas and that Santa represented him.

Then a startling question of clarification followed. It was like an ex cathedra statement. ‘So there is no real Santa that manages to come down a smoked chimney full of soot and yet appears with a white beard? Well, what do you say?’ He was looking for real answers of proof.

Like all adults I fudged and fumbled a vague answer. Then he asked me a major question, ‘Father, what age then do they tell us that there is no God, just like there is no Santa?’ I felt dim witted and flummoxed. The bell rang, playtime was over and I never got around to answering his vital and honest question even to this day.

Advent is an awareness time to help us not to miss the signs of God’s presence. Awareness is inseparable from the expectancy that was in the question posed to me in the school playground. We look at one another as believers with hope and expectancy.

Awareness and expectancy are central to Advent. Every day we watch the world in which we live and the people we meet with a sense of expectancy. Advent invites us to listen for the Word to come alive for us in Scripture and to ask the Spirit to bless our awareness through the signs of the sacraments.

These Advent reflections help us to celebrate the truth of ‘God-with-us’, who, despite the lurking questions in the playground of our hearts, invites us in the words of the gospel ‘to listen, to know and to follow’ (John 10:27).

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

‘God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.’ (1 Corinthians 1:9)

THIS great line from today’s second reading is a good first step into our Advent journey. The Bible is a detailed record of God’s search for us. The first question in Genesis 3:9 from God is addressed to Adam. He is playing his own version of hide and seek in a garden: ‘Where are you?’ Advent is a time to answer God’s question that is addressed to each of us.

In the Gospel, Mary Magdalene is in another garden. She discovers that the risen Lord has found her. She hears her name in a new way and is asked to proclaim the resurrection. She is asked to ‘Go and tell’ as an apostle to the apostles (John 20:17). How did she hear her name? Was it a gentle whisper? Was it an excited exclamation? Was it in astonishment? Was it a determined declaration?

Saint Augustine (354–420) in his Confessions probes his experiences with a restless search for meaning. Here, Augustine gives us a good example of a personal memoir, which we may think is an exclusively modern kind of writing for politicians, celebrities and sports stars alone. None of these, however, focus with detail on what Augustine calls his ‘twisted and tangled knottiness’.

But then unknown to me you caressed my head and when you closed my eyes lest they see things that would seduce me,

I began for a little while to forget myself.

But what I saw was not seen with the eye of the body.

(Confessions 7, 14; translated by Benignus O’ Rourke, OSA)

Advent is a graced time