Advent 2
December 7, 2008
Mark 1:1-8
When my family went to the beach this summer, the kids’ favorite thing to do was to have us dig a big hole on the beach that would fill with water. We’d bring out our sand shovels and dig dig dig until we had a deep hole, wide enough for them both to sit in with room left over. We’d surround the hole with walls of sand, sometimes with turrets and decorations of shells we’d found along the beach. And then we’d wait for the water to come and fill up the hole. It took some preparation, but when we were done we had this wonderful play spot that the kids called their “pool.” A kid-sized piece of the ocean where they could splash and play and look for sand crabs and build castles and float things and not worry about being thrown around by the big scary waves.
Throughout the week we’d experiment with where to place the hole.
Too close to the ocean and the waves would wash over the kids and scare them and flatten out all our work.
Too far and the kids would be sitting in a sandy hole, hot and frustrated, with the ground below too dry to hold water no matter how many bucketfulls we poured into it.
But just the right distance and we could create a little channel leading up to the hole so that every so often the water could gently enter in when the big waves came without washing over the walls.
When it was just right, the ground below was wet enough to hold that water for quite a while and Holden and I could lie back and relax while the kids contentedly played in their pool.
Preparation and patience were everything.
Advent is also about preparation and patience, which is why John the Baptist plays a lead role in our Gospel readings for the season. John wasn’t like other people – he had odd clothing and ate strange food and seemed to care nothing for the comforts of life. For some time, he lived in the desert – scorched by the sun by day and chilled under the vast sky at night. John lived with the elements, and John lived with God. And while John was in the desert, he heard God telling him to go into the world and prepare the way of the Lord, to make His paths straight.
John prepared himself and waited on God. And then he was able to hear God’s voice and do God’s work.
Advent reminds us of our own need to prepare, as John did, for God’s coming into the world. Advent reminds us to look for God acting in our lives and in the world, and, like John, to sit still and listen to God’s voice calling us.
Part of my attempt at preparation this Advent has been reading a short compilation of writings by Evelyn Underhill, a 20th century Christian mystic. Underhill was sure, and so am I, that God is with us, acting and loving all of the time.
As she puts it, “The whole power and splendor of God is always pressing in upon our small souls. Every time a channel is made for God, God comes; every time our hearts are open to God, God enters.”
Absolutely, God is always there. But we aren’t always prepared to see God; we aren’t always patient enough to hear God calling us.
One afternoon at the beach, we’d dug our hole and then it started raining. So we decided to head off to see one of the local lighthouses instead. Later that evening after dinner Sophie and I went back to the beach for a little walk and went looking for our hole just for fun. We couldn’t find any sign of it -- it had been leveled out by the waves while we’d been gone. Sophie was really curious and surprised that the water had come to fill our hole even though we hadn’t been there waiting for it.
The spiritual life is like that too, I think. Sometimes we’re not making any effort, or maybe we are but we feel like God is nowhere to be found. But even in those times, God is with us, acting and loving us, even if we can’t see the evidence of it until much later. No matter where we dug our hole, the ocean reached it eventually.
But the question for us during Advent is: How can we prepare ourselves to be more aware of God in our lives? How can we be filled by God’s love and savor that experience?
I think sometimes we dig our holes too close. We know just what we want and we expect instant results. So we start digging right next to the waves and before we even have much of a hole the waves overwhelm our work and we get scared and run off.
A friend of mine who was having trouble making some choices at the end of college decided to conduct an experiment. She’d think of her dilemma and then open the bible to a random place and poke her finger down. She’d read the passage closest to where her finger landed and decide what that meant for whatever it was she was trying to figure out. And apparently it went okay for a few things. But then one day when she put her finger down it landed on a passage that had nothing to do with what she’d asked and everything to do with something she hadn’t asked. She felt like God was telling her to change something in her life that she wasn’t ready to change. And she didn’t really like the idea of God being involved in that part of her business. So she stopped talking to God, very deliberately cut God off. She wanted a piece of what God had to offer, but got scared off when God wouldn’t stay neatly in the boundaries she’d set.
Other times, I think, we dig our hole too far away. We’re reluctant to get too close, or maybe just not particularly interested, and so we keep our distance. We dig our hole a nice safe expanse away from the waves and end up dry and unfulfilled.
Prayer is incredibly simple, and yet it’s one of the hardest things to make time for. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis uses letters between devils to point out how easy it is to divert us humans from spending time with God. It would be incredibly funny if it weren’t so disconcertingly close to home. We choose to sleep in rather than finding a space for quiet in the morning, or to go to bed early rather than making time at the end of the day. Or, my personal downfall, we opt to read about prayer rather than praying.
And even when we do manage to make time for it, our prayer goes astray so easily. We get distracted by noises, or suddenly find ourselves hungry, or start thinking about our every-growing To Do list. In my Advent book, Evelyn Underhill points to Jesus’ teaching: “When you pray, enter your closet and shut the door.” She sees that door as a metaphorical one that we often leave ajar to the peril of our prayer life. When we pray, we need to intentionally close that door in order to keep the world and its distractions out.
Thankfully, every once in a while, we get our hole just right. Every so often we’re willing to put in the time it takes to find that spot in the sand where the waves can reach without overwhelming us. We’re willing to hang out and wait even when the water seeps away again, knowing that another wave will come before too long and fill the hole again.
On Monday I came for the contemplative prayer gathering and sat down in the semi-circle in the back, near the labyrinth. I arrived still full of anxiety about things going on in my life, still a little tense from the details of getting the kids ready for bed and the house back in order. I wasn’t ready, but I was there. John started us off with a few minutes of introduction to the idea of contemplative prayer, some suggestions for ways we might enter the silence. And one idea he gave for a phrase to pray and come back to was “Here I am Lord.” There is nothing new about those words – people in close communion with God throughout the ages have spoken some variation of them, and often just before God acted in some incredible way. People like Moses and Jacob and Samuel and Mary. And yet the words felt new to me somehow. Rather than asking God to come, I was letting God know that I was trying to be present, that I was trying to open myself up and let God in. And feeling those words, trying to mean those words, helped me to actually be present.
Every once in a while when we’re trying to set aside a space for God, we’ll have one of those moments of real connection. Other times we’ll just have a few minutes of stillness where we don’t feel much of anything. And of course sometimes we won’t get the voices in our heads to stop even for a second. But even in those times, when the results aren’t even remotely tangible, we have to trust that we’ve been just a little bit transformed. That God has seeped in enough to renew us a little, or make us just the tiniest bit more peaceful, or lighten the load on our shoulders a tad. We have to rely on God to take those moments and shape us in some way.
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” instruct our readings for this morning. We have a God who comes into the real world and transforms real people. Our job is to make a channel to our hearts so that God can enter in and transform us. Amen.
Elizabeth Rees