Today is the first Sunday of Advent which prepares us for the coming of Christ. It is filled with the tension of joy and hope that Jesus brings, but also is filled with the waiting and anticipation of it having not yet come.
This, I think is the Christian life. It has a surprising similarity to the Lent/Easter season, but truly I think it is representative of the Christian life. The hope and joy we have living in the tension of a not yet redeemed world. Sometimes, it's hard to know what to do with it.
But, I was struck with the importance of it this morning. I woke up from a dream where my little sister offered me pot (wtf?) and was feeling horribly sorry for myself and generally wallowy when suddenly the tension caught me off guard. This tension we live in is real. And we can fight it and wallow and distract, but ultimately we have to live in it regardless.
I find the tension beaufitul on days I'm not so busy striving for distraction or anxiety that we miss that it can be kinda beautiful.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.Your ideas mature gradually–let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
That's all I got.
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