Thursday of the First Week of Advent
It’s such a busy time of year these few weeks before Christmas. I love Advent and the liturgical richness of this time, and I get frustrated sometimes with my own stress and external pressures that I take on to hustle and bustle and hurry up and get all my shopping and decorating done (which I never seem to be able to get done in a timely fashion anyhow). I wish I could just stay in the mode of the quiet waiting and preparing of our hearts for Jesus’ coming.
Today’s readings encourage us to do just that: to stay in the moment of preparing our hearts for Christmas and building a solid spiritual foundation. The familiar gospel reading (Matthew 7: 21, 24-27) of the house built on rock versus the house built on sand, reminds us that we need a strong foundation of faith based on hearing the word of God and acting on it. This gospel passage is the closing of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is calling his disciples and all people to conversion; an aptly chosen reading for the first week of Advent.
We also have the image of a rock in today’s first reading (Isaiah 26:1-6) in which we are reminded that God is an “eternal Rock.” Wow. Now that’s a serious foundation to build on; a rock that is never ending, never eroding, always strong, always there.
So, I wonder about building a solid foundation in our homes and within our families this Advent. Sometimes, in our home with three children, it seems almost counterproductive to try to have family Advent rituals. When the kids were younger, there were frequent arguments and sometimes tears over whose turn it was to open the advent calendar window (that had some scripture passage, not the kind with little pieces of chocolate!) or whether the older ones could have a turn lighting the advent candles at dinner each night, and let’s hurry up because our dinner is getting cold! Now that they’re getting older, it’s a challenge to get everyone at the table together for dinner each night given the various extracurricular activities in the evenings.
But I do believe it’s worth the effort and we do keep trying because even if it doesn’t always work or isn’t done perfectly, we’re still showing them (and reminding ourselves) that this is important. We can make time for school and work and sports and music lessons and friends and computer, so we really need to make time to build the spiritual foundation of our home as well. And isn’t Advent a great time to do that? Really, that’s where God is, in the messiness and chaos of our everyday lives. So, if we don’t let God in there, then we’ll never be letting God in. And that is really what the incarnation – Jesus becoming like us and being born to a young poor woman in a stable – is all about.
When the rain falls, the floods come, and the winds buffet my spiritual house (and we all know that rough times do come around again and again in life), I want it to be able to stand. Let us pray for the ears to hear God’s word and the strength to act on God’s word especially this Advent season, so that we will have a foundation of rock, God the Eternal Rock.
-Eileen Miller