Spiritual Impatience

American marketing has been pushing us relentlessly toward Christmas. The malls have been decorated for months with its Christmas finery, lights, music, sale notices. Along with the marketing we seem to move even faster in our Northern Virginia culture. Add all this together, and we are increasingly less patient, and pressing ever-onward in a hurry to get to our destination, accomplish more, and do all of it efficiently.

As we arrive on this Third Sunday of Advent, pressing forward and efficiently with Christmas business, we hear Advent’s all too frequent thematic. We read in the Letter of Apostle James: “Be patient… You too must be patient.” That may be good advice, but we just don’t have the time. James explains further how we are to wait. We are invited to be like farmers waiting the fruit of the earth. We are to be patient with the earth “until it receives the early and the late rains.”

Filled with Christmas anticipation, we come to a decorated church, not with holiday finery, but with the stark purples and dark blues of the night. The Church waits in purple. What is this “foot-dragging” about it? Then, at the beginning of Mass we continue with those meditations that may be seen to impede our getting into the Mass. We are asked to stop, to reflect, and to pray. Breathe, close your eyes, and take time with the Lord.

Not Even a Carol
As the meditation continues, parishioners continue to enter, seemingly oblivious to the liturgical action at hand. In our Advent waiting, we are asked to notice the action of God in our lives, but we don’t notice that the whole community is at prayer. Late comers, because we have no time, continue their movement down the aisles and climbing over those already at meditation. The critique of the whole celebration is, “Couldn’t we even sing a carol – just to get ready for Christmas?”

We could sneak a Christmas tune in, but we read the signs of the liturgy including the readings and the somber colors and we wait. That’s the long tradition of the Catholic Church. Not to be too counter-cultural, we choose to wait, to pray, and to allow the Lord to move among us.

So what is this “holy impatience” about? The liturgy teaches us patience, more than impatience. In any case, it is holy, for we allow God to search us out and we look for him within ourselves and within the Assembly. The liturgical Assembly has

traditionally been called a favored school of prayer, where we learn to pray.

Learning to Pray
While praying in this Advent Season, we become students, or better, disciples of prayer. A look at our experience offers us the various dimensions of how to pray. Advent’s first lesson is that the Word of God is central to prayer.

We are invited by the Word to listen and receive the Word with attention and with faith. The scriptural word is always a new experience of God’s relationship with his people. In its original speaking by God through the community and by the various writers, a new relationship is forged. That same relationship is offered to contemporary hearers of the Word. The Word, we learn, is revelatory of God, of the faith community, and of the individual believer.

This Word experience is a human and divine experience, where the reality of the divine is intertwined with our human words and actions. Silence is the primary tool to engage in the process of discerning where God moves within our human history and the limitations of human word and gesture. The prayer process begins with the human endeavor where God shows himself to us, but moves quickly to transforming silence. In silence, the relationship move more intimately and intensely.

The prayer experience begins, and is communicated, through our human nature. Our bodies, our minds, our spirits need one another in our experience of God showing himself to us. Prayer begins as we focus ourselves. We are aware of our surroundings, of our bodies, of our very breathing. Soon we pass to silence and to the experience of God within and around us. Then we can expect God to speak in the quiet stillness.

Be Still / The Challenge
Advent in particular, and prayer in general, challenges us to be still, to stop the ordinariness of our lives, and to expect new things in our relationship with God. This stopping takes time, it takes work, and it demands attention. Advent reminds us that Jesus became flesh, the divine took on humanness. In the transformation of prayer, the interaction of divine and human continues. Advent brings us to Christmas, when we are reminded that human history is transformed by the divine. Our encounter with the divine, the Presence of God, invites conversion and new life in God.

CDH