November 27, 2022

Today’s Advent theme is HOPE – a lovely soft word and I quote again my favourite lines about hope from Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” That thing with feathers perched in the soul – sounds like the Holy Spirit to me. She sings the ongoing tune of God’s compassionate care for us all – singing without words and never stopping at all. This resonates with that beloved passage in Romans 8 (v 26-27) which assures us that when we feel too weak or overwhelmed to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us – with sighs too deep for words. Such an encouraging and comforting image.

On the other hand, hope can also be seen as an overused word that has become almost meaningless – or some kind of band-aid word that we can apply to cover wounds in hopes that the bleeding messes will stay hidden until they heal nicely on their own, under their dark cover. If we keep up with world news, it’s hard to stay hopeful, isn’t it? The war in Ukraine is now nine months old, and I wish we could say that peace is being born, but we know that the opposite is true. In this and other contexts of great human suffering, we’d do well, I think, to not cast about the word hope too lightly – especially given our own privileged context, with Canada being among the safest and most comfortable countries in the world.

Among the hopeful messages in our readings today is what Isaiah prophesies: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” This shows us what God desires for us and our world. Many of us wish that God would intervene more directly to bring about such peace and such focus on feeding people instead of killing them, especially the children. Coercion is not God’s way, but still, we’re hopeful enough to pray, hoping there will be a way for evil to fail and peace to prevail.

And each year Advent starts with an apocalyptic gospel – today we start the Matthew focused Year A again. With the beginning of a new church year, we have an end-times focus. Seems a bit odd, but there are usually no new beginnings without space being made by some endings. In today’s gospel selection Jesus says that it’s not for us to know the day or hour when the end will begin – only God knows this. Of course, in our times we have much more evidence that humans are destroying the earth’s climate, rather than God. Paul in Romans encourages us then to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.” It’s likely safe to say that harming the earth which Creator made to sustain us – is a work of darkness. As to the armour of light, we are likely called to arm ourselves with Advent attentiveness – to increase our attention on all that causes so much harm to the earth’s children and all creatures – and to find ways to bring greater hope to those who live such lives of desperation.

And how can we reflect on our own journeys in a spirit of greater hopefulness? Last week I finished reading a highly-regarded 1997 book by John O’Donohue called Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. Has anyone here read it? I especially appreciated the last two chapters – on aging and on dying. The chapter on aging focused quite a bit on the need to heal our souls as we age, so that we can be more at peace. “Your inner wounds cry out for healing” writes O’Donohue (p 182-3). But he helpfully cautions against going back to the wounds and opening them up again. He says that “A lot of therapy reverses the process of healing” by taking off the protective healing skin that has grown around it. I was so glad to hear his take on this and I think it fits with many traditional and indigenous ways of healing – do not go back and pick at the sore spots and make them bleed again! “Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone” he writes, “This is the art of spiritual noninterference.” Instead O’Donohue encourages as, as we age, to bring compassion to our woundedness and especially to our regrets or things that we remember as mistakes in our lives. “Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes” he writes. And he goes on to say that in the soul’s journey most of the precious moments can grow from those mistakes. Now that, to me, was a message of great personal hopefulness – that our mistakes, we might say, have been our greatest teachers.

His chapter on death was equally hopeful. “For the Celts, the eternal world was so close to the natural world that death was not seen as a … threatening event” he writes, “When you enter the eternal world, you are going home to where no shadow, pain or darkness can ever touch you again.” He says that the dead are our nearest neighbours, and I’ve felt that – like my grandson who died age 20 is now available to me anytime I want to enjoy thinking about him. The bookmark I use to read the Harry Potter books, for example, is a slice of a photo showing him sitting on a rock in the forest when he was about 11 – Harry’s age when the Hogwarts adventures start. So, every time I opened one of those seven volumes, I look at him in the photo and think – okay Gordo, let’s see what happens next. And when I close the book and move the bookmark, I look at him and say – wow, wasn’t that something else, eh? Silly, I guess, but it is a hopeful experience for me to share this fun activity of reading Harry Potter with him.

So, our Advent One mission, should we choose to accept it – is to find or bring more hopefulness in our lives and in our world. Not in a Pollyanna kind of way where we turn our backs on the pain of the world. I don’t think that’s an option for us who wish to live more deeply into the compassionate heart of God the Creator of all. And as we find that hopefulness, may we ask God’s help in becoming channels of greater hopefulness for our world, Amen.