At this beginning of a new
liturgical year the Church invites us to lay aside all distress, worry and
hopelessness in order to give the light of God’s Word a chance to penetrate our
darkness. St. Paul assures us: God, who is ever faithful, calls us to communion with his Son, Jesus
Christ our Lord. All our hope
resides in that trustworthy call. Would God deceive us and call us to something
illusory? But will we truly open our hearts and allow ourselves to become like expectant
children, dazzled by reliable promises of a joyful life?
Today is also the first day of what our Holy
Father Francis has declared to be the Year
of Consecrated Life. Though all
Christians have been consecrated to God by baptism into Christ, there are in
the Church those of us called to live this consecrated life in a particular
manner, totally at one with all the faithful and in no way superior to anyone,
yet witnessing before the whole world, by the specific form of our life, to
what is of perennial value.
With reference to us who
are vowed to a contemplative monastic life, St. John Paul II has written, By their lives and mission, the members of these
Institutes imitate Christ in his prayer on the mountain, bear witness to God’s
lordship over history and anticipate the glory which is to come…In solitude
and silence, by listening to the word of God, participating in divine worship,
personal asceticism, prayer, mortification and the communion of fraternal love,
they direct the whole of their lives and all their activities to the
contemplation of God. In this way they offer the ecclesial community a singular
testimony of the Church’s love for her Lord, and they contribute, with hidden
apostolic fruitfulness, to the growth of the People of God. Vita Consecrata 8
The Prophet Isaiah
portrays for us the beginning of the contemplative call, in a way that may be
summed up in the two words conversion and
supplication. We are called to the
monastery not on account of any merit or special quality of ours—quite to the
contrary: in his mysterious freedom, God calls us out of a condition of dire
need, of radical dissatisfaction. You have hidden your face from us and have
delivered us up to our guilt, the prophet cries out to God. God’s apparent absence and rejection of us
have plunged us into a threatening void, and we receive the grace not to turn
to idolatry out of desperation but rather to seek the true God all the more
fervently, imploring him with savage desire to come to our rescue and save us
by showing us the light of his Face: Oh,
that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking
before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for. The very ability, energy and impulse to appeal
deafeningly to God out of our misery is the greatest of graces.
It is sheer grace that
makes us cry out to God instead of despairing, sheer grace that makes us lament
our sins and desire with our whole heart that our life could start again, could
assume a new shape (we are the clay and
you are the potter), sheer grace even to imagine the joy of clinging to God
permanently with all our strength. Such
is the desert place where a monastic vocation begins. It is a place of precariousness because what goes on here is mostly supplication (the root meaning of
“precarious”), pure begging for help, pure dependency, as we sink into the
awareness that we can do nothing to save ourselves. In this place Christ is experienced largely
as a still unfulfilled promise, and the typical prayer that dominates this
state of soul is the prayer of repentance: Lord,
have mercy on me a poor sinner!
Photograph by Father Emmanuel.
Excerpts from Father Simeon's Homily for the First Sunday of Advent.
Excerpts from Father Simeon's Homily for the First Sunday of Advent.