Fr William Fennelly OSB
One of the great theologians of the Catholic Church in the 20th century was the German Jesuit, Karl Rahner. and he once reflected that there were two times in the Church year which especially summed up what Christian life was about. One of those times is a single day, the other is a great Season. He was speaking of Holy Saturday and the time of Advent that we’re starting out on today. And what links those two very different times, one in the midst of the Easter celebrations, the other leading us into our Christmas celebration, is that they’re both about expectancy, waiting, not-being-there-yet.
Holy Saturday speaks of the disciples in the anguish of that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday when all seemed to be lost and all God’s plans brought to nothing. Their experience was of death; resurrection was something they hadn’t yet tasted. And Advent likewise is a time of waiting. As we wait to celebrate Christmas, we have some sense of the experience of those who waited for the first coming of Jesus. The Scriptures associated with this Season are about vigilance, staying awake, being prepared, preparing the way. It’s a Season which asks us to think on the coming of Jesus: not only at the time of our death; not only at the end of time; but above all, in the here and now, in the everyday, and on every day. It asks us whether we’re ready for that coming of the Lord. So, Holy Saturday and Advent have this in common: a mood of expectancy, of waiting, of not-being-there-yet. And Karl Rahner’s point was that that is so typical of our own life as disciples:
We long for God, but sometimes God seems so distant, so hard to grasp.
We’re inspired by the Gospel, but in practice we seem to fail so regularly when it comes to its ideals
We’re a people who, on our good days, treasure the salvation that comes to us in Jesus, but so often we get overwhelmed by our own sense of falling short, of being what we would rather not be. Like Advent and Holy Saturday our life in the Spirit can seem so often to be an “in-between time”, frustratingly suspended between what we strive towards and what we actually are. But there are two ways of living in the “in-between time”, two ways of living with “not-being-there-yet”: One is the way of frustration and despair in which we’re overwhelmed by our own sense of failure, of sin, of what is not, always disappointed with ourselves, always seeing ourselves as a second-class disciple. The other way is the way of hope, which is precisely what this great season of Advent offers.
The Second Vatican Council used a beautiful image of what the Church is: it was the image of a “pilgrim people”. Drawing on that ancient idea of pilgrimage it’s an image which reminds us that the journey is just as important as the destination; that our fidelity to God and God’s call is not only expressed by “finally getting there”, but by the way we live the struggle of the journey, by our persistence on the journey, by our trying, and our repeated willingness to pick ourselves up under God’s grace and to begin again, and again, and again. And so ‘we’re not there yet’ as we’re all too aware so often. But Advent speaks a message of hope for those who wait, a message of comfort for those who are pilgrims on a difficult and, at times, frustrating, journey. If our hope was based simply on the desire that we might one day ‘get it all right’, we’d be more than likely bound for disappointment, and bound for despair. But the source of Christian hope doesn’t lie in our getting it all right, but in the God who loves us anyway, who accepts us in our messiness, and who accompanies us on the stumbling journey, not waiting for us up there ahead at the final destination. The whole point of a pilgrimage is that the journey is as important as the destination. We don’t have to get it all right because we can’t get it all right. But we can, with God’s grace, keep trying. That’s the pilgrimage.
So, as people of the “in-between time”, the people who “are-not-there-yet”, the people who are a mixture of saint and sinner, the Holy Saturday people who wait for the resurrection, the Advent people who look for the coming of Jesus, we should be a people of hope, a hope that can’t be diminished because of our own failings, however many they are, because it’s a hope founded on the love, the compassion and the forgiveness of God which has NO limit.