advent one: following jesus...

Advent One - the close of this year's Thanksgiving weekend - and the heart of early winter spirituality has dawned - and I am ready. Currently these fair hills are being bombarded with snow that will likely keep us home-bound for another 36 hours. The crew from Brooklyn got home safely earlier this afternoon, we got out to do our "snowmagedeon" shopping, and Lucie has been reunited with the pack after a brief vacation at the kennel. (It is better for everyone involved when there are little ones loping about to have Loopy Lucie off premises.) The Christmas tree is up and strung with lights. The Advent wreath is in place. And naps have been today's embodied prayer.

This Advent I am limping around with bruises and swelling, sitting on extra soft cushions, and generally moaning and groaning due to a nasty fall I took earlier in the week. On Friday the cumulative external pain mixed with my predilection
to inner laziness got the best of me and I was knocked on my ass yet again - this time with a case of the blues like nobody's business. I am not prone to depression as a rule, you see. Maybe two or three seasonal encounters with melancholia when the days of winter appear to be frozen in place. But, as a rule, I am at peace with my station in life. But not so on Friday. I desperately despised everything that day. Bored with TV, music, literature, poetry, food, drink, faith, hope, love, and myself, I was simultaneously sorry for my miserable soul and disgusted with reality. Not depressed or suicidal, mind you. Such has never been my curse. But rather, I was wrestling yet again with the noonday devil -  acedia as the Desert Fathers and Mothers have taught me over the decades - an ugly and dark place for any one but especially so for one who revels in the sacramental beauty and wisdom of the sacred revealed in the ordinary.

Acedia is "a state of restlessness and the inability to either work or pray" that serves as prelude to the deadly sin of sloth. Precisely. I have been avoiding, then neglecting, and even intentionally disregarding focused quiet time with the Lord. Glimpses of grace broke through the haze for me over the past few months. And I know them to be signs of the love God has for even the most indolent. And still I studiously avoided the silence. Distracted myself from deep prayer. And avoided what I knew to be deep calling to deep because... I don't really know why. I just did. 

Isn't that the way we become our worst enemy? Filled with an unwarranted arrogance, I just quit going to the well of forgiveness and presence. St. Paul taught that we all do this from time to time - and I can say without any joy that I've been there and done that more than once - in fact, one of my favorite texts from the Scriptures is Romans 1 where the apostle writes:

The absence of God in our lives (wrath) is revealed... for what can be known about God is plain to us, because God has shown it to us. Ever since the creation of the world God's eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made. So we are without excuse... but trusting that we know better than God, we become futile in our thinking... Claiming to be wise, we became fools, exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. (We become bestial!) Therefore God gives us up to the lusts of our hearts... so that we might feel our emptiness and return to the One who is Holy.

I know that God rarely runs away from us. We do it - and then blame the sacred for our sloth. Or lust. Or fear. Or whatever. As Friday unfolded, I felt more and more resentful and lethargic until it slowly started to dawn on me that I needed to feel this bleakness. I needed to sense in my flesh and heart both my own lies and the aching absence for God's grace that was growing within me. As one of my mentors, the wise and humble Kathleen Norris, put it:

Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world - the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming - acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to 'the next best thing,' another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attached to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothful, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more.

My shiftless feelings, my distraction from regular silence and reflection, gave voice to what I believe to be God's gentle song: come home, come home, ye who are weary come home, softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling o sinner, come home. Some may recoil at the word sinner. Not me. Sin is not only when we miss the mark in loving, it is also choosing to follow the distractions that lead to a malnourished heart. "Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life," asks Norris, "but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God?” As I began to own this I happened upon an invitation to a reading project for Advent. Based upon a lecture Henri Nouwen gave during one of his most broken-hearted and confused times, the invitation was to simply "return to following Jesus." "What could be better for Advent?" I thought. Nouwen said out loud to others what he himself ached to believe:

God invites us to come home. Throughout the Scriptures home is what incarnation is all about. When we realize that we are God’s home and that we are invited to make our home where God has made God’s home. We (begin to) realize that . . . we are the place where God can dwell. (Following Jesus, p. 22)

So that's where I am - and where I am going - this Advent. Quietly, regularly, silently, and with very small steps, its time for me to follow Jesus - yet again. "Into this deeply tired world of ours that God sends Jesus to speak the voice of love. Jesus says, “Follow me. Don’t keep running around. Follow me. Don’t just sit there. Follow me.”