1st Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024
Gary Meagher, Member Presider
“To whom can I speak when no one remembers the wisdom of the past, when no one now helps those who struggle for goodness in the world? To whom can I speak when those who would speak for justice have gone silent and the land is left to the doers of harm, and when the truth of suffering all over the world is mentioned, everyone simply seeks to lay blame on others? To whom can I turn when there is no intimate friend, no heart that I can trust…?”
These words, this lament, was written over 4,500 years ago by an anonymous Egyptian man and is considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature. The writer, known to us as the “world weary man”, is calling upon his BA, his divine-immortal soul, to make sense of the world. He looks to his soul to guide and release him from earthly entanglements and unite him with the Creator.
This man’s world included excess violence, loss of all civil society and the collapse of institutions. Deeply discouraged, he finds himself at the edge of life and on the verge of despair.
He further writes: “To whom can I speak these days, when hearts have become cold, and brother turns against brother and even friends can’t offer love? And why speak at all when gentleness has perished… Why speak when most have now become intrigued with evil, and goodness becomes neglected everywhere?”
The soul to which he speaks, his BA, was often symbolized by a star that would guide a person through their life while connecting them to the heavens, to something greater than themselves.
To be alive at our moment in history, 4,500 years after the “world weary man”, means also to experience a sense of grief and sorrow.
History is circular, it keeps coming back.
The losses that we are experiencing in nature and culture around the world have indeed produced a sense of weariness. (It’s so hard to watch the news anymore.) And because of the upheaval of our days, we can find ourselves, much like this ancient writer, repeatedly on the edge of despair.
But if there is one thing that history can teach us, that even in times of grief, sorrow, and despair, there is a light that shines through (that must shine through); a star that can lead us on our days.
2,500 years after the “world weary man”, a small Jewish community that was faced with many of the same challenges as the Egyptian world, found their soul (our soul) in the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth.
We approach this season of Advent, as we do every year, in anticipation and quiet waiting. We are waiting for our “guiding star”. As Jeremiah in today’s first reading states: “The days are surely coming.” This year our anticipation seems to carry extra weight.
“Come, Lord Jesus” the Advent mantra, means that all Christian history must live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of hopeful waiting/anticipation. Union with the Divine, perfect fullness, is a promise that is always to come, –we do not need to demand it now. This yearning, or anticipation, keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than us.
Richard Rohr writes: “When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, “Why weren’t you this for me? Why doesn’t life do that for me?, (Why didn’t the election turn out as I wished it?), we are refusing to say “Come, Lord Jesus.” We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by the Creator.”
“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into surrender that is sometimes called the virtue of hope, leading us to a kind of freedom. We trust in the promise of Jesus.
The virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Source (our North Star) is beyond ourselves. We can trust that Jesus will come again into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.
Our Christian heritage becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of despair but an assured song of hope, of heavenly hope.
We are not so different from the anonymous Egyptian writer, the “world weary man”. We all desire to make sense of our days. We all desire to experience Divine union and through that hope for our world.
The line from today’s readings that resonated most with me was when Paul writing to the community at Thessaloniki states: “make more and more progress in the kind of life that you are meant to live”.
During this season of Advent where do we find our divine soul and how do we live “more and more” into the kind of life that we are meant to live?
