Readings (Year A):
Isaiah 2:1 – 5
Psalm 122: 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8 – 9
Romans 13:11 – 14
Matthew 24:37 – 44
Reflection: May we be the hope this Advent season
The readings that open this Advent season and our new liturgical year are more apocalyptic than those we generally associate with Advent. They can evoke anxiety instead of hope, uncertainty rather than the promise of light. In some ways, they feel quite appropriate for these days in which we U.S. believers can struggle to maintain our faith in the promises that life will overcome death, good will triumph over evil, and the arc of the moral universe will keep bending towards justice.
I was fortunate to have found a Dignity community very early in my adulthood. As a 21-year-old recent graduate of a secular women’s college, a lesbian student at a Jesuit seminary, and someone who had not been welcome in a Catholic community for over three years, finding a place where Queer Catholics prayed together with great fervor and made deep connections between faith and the realities of our lives was an unimaginable gift. The communities of Dignity Boston, DignityUSA, and the progressive Catholic movement have been my home for well over 40 years. My adult faith has been deeply shaped by living most of it within the context of exile, oppression, marginalization, and even threat, at times.
Many of us have enjoyed the privilege of belonging to a church and other communities that have shaped much of the culture in which we live. But for the early Christian community and for many of the communities that shaped our scriptural tradition, life was much more challenging. Their beliefs were not necessarily the dominant ones, and were often derided, devalued, at times even seen as dangerous. I imagine that the conflicted imagery of these readings, where hope and threat co-exist, and where both are very real, would resonate with many of our ancestors in faith.
For people who are exiled, marginalized, oppressed, and literally threatened, as so many are in our country now, hope and fear coexist daily. Life can feel tenuous, and for many every day brings great fear and uncertainty. And yet, many who understand that their lives are seen as less valuable, more expendable than those of others, are also people of fierce hope. Even as they know that tragedy could strike in an instant, they hold fast to a vision akin to the one Isaiah puts forth, that righteousness and harmony will, one day, be the reality for all peoples, and that the dream of the creative divine lover will become reality upon the earth.
Perhaps one of the calls for us this Advent is to ponder what hope and expectation meant for our ancestors in the faith, and what they mean today for our siblings most like those from whom these scriptures arose. Can we use our own present-day experience of upheaval, anxiety, fear, and even powerlessness as a way into a deeper understanding of this sacred season’s meaning? And how we can, through true solidarity, help to incarnate light, hope, and the union of the human and the divine in the lives of the most vulnerable with whom we share this earth?
May we be the hope that leads everyone to rejoice.
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