Advent: a special season of discernment

November 28, 2004 -- First Sunday of Advent

By Bishop Robert Morneau

	Bishop Robert Morneau
	Questions for reflection: 1. How does God come into your life? 2. Do you have to deal with nihilism? 3. What is God's dream?

Advent's challenge? "Stay awake!" This liturgical season is one of deep expectation. The God who has come into history continues to break into our lives. Our task is to prepare our minds and hearts for that coming and to offer our "refuge," God, a portion of gracious hospitality.

God came in the days of Noah. People were caught up in the basics of life - eating, drinking, raising a family - when suddenly everything came to an end. The flood swept them away. Noah alone, alert to far off things, was prepared for the event.

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God comes today in so many ways. God speaks to us through the scriptures, celebrates life with us through the sacraments, encounters us through the community, manifests himself to us through the wonders of nature. We must not allow our lives to be consumed by eating and drinking and making money. We must be aware that in all the activities of life there is a religious dimension that must be discerned. Advent is a special season of discernment.

God came in the days of St. Paul. This apostle to the Gentiles is clear: salvation is now, the day is at hand, we must put on the Lord Jesus who is the armor of light. What inhibits our souls from experiencing this Advent coming are the works of darkness: orgies, drunkenness, promiscuity, lust, rivalry and jealousy. This conduct kills the spirit and blinds us to God's redeeming love and mercy.

God came back in the days of the prophet Isaiah. To this prophet God gave a vision of future times when many people would be awake and alert to the divine presence. They would venture to the mountain of God and dwell in the divine presence. More, Isaiah was given insight into God's kingdom when swords would be turned into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. In God's time there will be no more training for war because nations will live in peace.

Unfortunately, many nations and many of us as individuals do not walk in the light of the Lord. Thus wars continue, lives are broken, dullness and insensitivity permeate the human spirit. The Advent call is clear. Wake up! God is near. Salvation is at hand. God's dream will not be deferred.

In our time there is a disease that, in a special way, prevents many from being Advent people, that is, a people of hope, expectation, and enthusiasm. It is the disease of nihilism.

George Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul II, wrote Letters to a Young Catholic. In this text he captures well the illness of nihilism: "If you live today, you breathe in nihilism . . . it's the gas you breathe," wrote Flannery O'Connor; "if I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now." So, I expect, would I. So, perhaps, would you. So here's one more way to think about Catholicism and its distinctive optic on the world and on us: Catholicism is an antidote to nihilism. And by "nihilism," I mean, not the sour, dark, often violent nihilism of Nietzsche and Sartre, but what my friend, the late Father Ernest Fortin (who borrowed the term from his friend, Alan Bloom), used to call "debonair nihilism": the nihilism that enjoys itself on the way to oblivion, convinced that all of this - the world, us, relationships, sex, beauty, history - is really just a cosmic joke. Against the nihilist claim that nothing is really of consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence, because everything has been redeemed by Christ (13).

During this season of Advent let us remember that "everything is of consequence."

(Bp. Morneau is the auxiliary bishop of the Green Bay Diocese.)