The grief and heartache of the lives lost in Colorado Springs, Colorado, during Thanksgiving week, were soon followed by violence in San Bernardino, California. Coloradoans are a hearty and rustic bunch, but our communities grieve with those families who lost loved ones in these tragic events. Our prayers are with you in this season of Advent.
In Colorado, we are reminded of the Columbine High School and Aurora movie theater tragedies, whenever this kind of news breaks. It was two days after the theater shooting, when I had arrived on Mackinac Island, Michigan, for a family summer vacation, as the Chicago-Mackinac race had finished. Every boat docked in the harbor had its flags at half-mast—and there were many.
When I inquired about the flags, a gentleman replied to me. “It’s for Colorado,” he said. In the U.P. of Michigan that summer, I took comfort in this visible sign of solidarity. I was struck by the contrast of the encounter; of the beauty of the light and the profound silence of loss.
The sunset cast its glow on the calm water, as I stood on the dock, surprised by the kindness of strangers and the reality of evil. Loss can isolate us, stranding us on islands of grief—our days obscured by shadows.
An ancient expectancy unfolds
We are not alone in darkness. Advent calls us to be watchful, to anticipate the light of Christ.
Life is full of Advent moments; moments of expectation, consolation and hope.
In the Church, Advent is a time of preparation, and expectancy. The faithful remain constant in firm hope that the light of Christ illuminates the darkness, embracing life’s most difficult questions.
“When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Savior’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming.” By celebrating the precursor’s birth and martyrdom the Church unites herself to his desire: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ (The Catechism of the Catholic Church 524)
The call to a blessed life and ‘terrible mystery’
The violent acts perpetrated against our community and others, leave us to ask: “Why?”—“Why does a good God permit evil?” “Why?”—“Why do we suffer?”
“Why?” floats across the frozen December sky falling to the ground with barely a sound. If you could see the “Whys?” born from another’s pain, you might put out your hand as you do to catch a snowflake with curious care. You might wonder whose “Why?” had come to your hand. You might observe its delicate form. You might notice that, like snowflakes, every “Why?” is unique. It would reflect the shape of the lives that were intertwined, in a pattern that crystallized in a given moment in time, when human beings encountered each other in light and darkness—good and evil, joy and sorrow, in the mystery of their existence.
The truth is that the Christian faith has no ‘quick’ answer for “Why?”
‘If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all creatures, why does evil exist?’ To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin, and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.” (CCC 309)
It’s a truly frightening consideration that, by a ‘terrible mystery,’ human creatures are endowed with the freedom to cooperate with good or evil—to choose life or death. “God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.” (CCC 311)
When our lives our touched by evil, and by violence, the spirit of the world provokes with doubt and fear, as we saw in a New York Daily News headline.
The hard winter of sorrow
Sorrow touches every human life. Sometimes, it seems to move in like a swift winter storm. Often, unresolved grief accumulates and burdens our hearts, like the weight of heavy snow on tree limbs, bending and breaking the tender branches of the human heart.
We should take care with our sorrow. St. Francis de Sales wrote in Chapter XII of Introduction to the Devout Life that we should allow our sorrow to be touched by God’s grace (‘Godly sorrow’), and to avoid the temptation of sorrow that is turned away from God (‘worldly sorrow’).
“The ‘sorrow of the world’ disturbs the heart, plunges it into anxiety, stirs up unreasonable fears, disgusts it with prayer, overwhelms and stupefies the brain, deprives the soul of wisdom, judgment, resolution, and courage, weakening all its powers; in a word, it is like a hard winter, blasting all the earth’s beauty, and numbing all animal life; for it deprives the soul of sweetness and power in every faculty.” (204)
We can choose the “good streams,” as St. Francis de Sales refers to them, of mercy and repentance. He admonishes us to “vigorously resist” the melancholy, anxiety, and spiritual depression that may become an opportunity for temptation, with increased prayer and devotion, even if “done coldly, wearily, and indifferently.” He encourages us “not to give in.”
Rather, we must keep an ember of love burning, in the hope that it will produce a flame born of the love of God, by which we warm our heart and the hearts of others. The light of God shelters our “Why?”
With the first breath Jesus breathed as a baby, and his last breath on the cross, he gave us a light in the darkness, and an invitation to partake in the divine life of our Creator.
“All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:3-5).
The season of the seed
It was the Blessed Virgin Mary’s joy at the birth of her son, Jesus Christ, and her grief at the cross that was mysteriously intertwined that cold dark night in Bethlehem.
In The Reed of God, Caryll Houselander wrote:
“Advent is the season of the seed: Christ loved this symbol of the seed. The seed, He said is the Word of God sown in the human heart…If we have truly given our humanity to be changed into Christ, it is essential that we do not disturb this time of growth. It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ’s radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless we must believe that He is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything, to this almost incredible reality.” (55)
The suffering we endure often leaves us frustrated, as we long for spiritual growth, or grow weary of our afflictions. Frequently, we compare ourselves to others foolishly surmising that we have not suffered as well as we might—but, take heart! The biographies of the Saints remind us of how much more love is purified, when the aridity of prayer life and our human weaknesses leave us feeling like a wanderer in the deep snow, unable to take one more step, as we battle to keep our hearts from growing cold with cynicism and contempt.
Houselander captures human suffering:
“People sometimes get disheartened because they have read that suffering ennobles and have met people who seem to have come out of the crucible like pure silver, made beautiful by suffering; but it seems to them that in their own case it is quite the opposite. They find that, however hard they try not to be, they are irritable; that astonishing stabs of bitterness afflict them, that far from being more sympathetic, more understanding, there is a numbness, a chill on their emotions: they cannot respond to others at all; they seem not to love anyone anyone any more; and they even shrink from and dread the very presence of, those who are compassionate and who care for them. (66)
Peacefully confronting suffering
When we feel like we have failed to ‘come out of the crucible like pure silver,’ we are tempted to discouragement. In Searching For and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart, Father Jacques Philippe is clear: “The most decisive motive to aid us in peacefully confronting the drama of human suffering is this: we must take very seriously the mystery of the Incarnation and that of the Cross. Jesus took our flesh. He really took upon Himself our sufferings.” (49)
Devotion to the Incarnate Word is a series of rhythmic seasons of Advent in the soul, Houselander wrote. We must allow Christ to unfold in our souls. She sums it up: “We must be patient with our sufferings. Advent is a time of growth, of darkness and hiding, and waiting—trusting rightly that Christ is growing in one’s sorrow.” (66)
It is difficult to allow the fruits of sorrow to mature; to wait for the ‘hard winter’ to turn to spring. We must tend to our sorrow without rash disappointment, resignation, or bitterness, but in anticipation that God will bring a greater good from evil, and comfort us in our suffering.
Who better to speak to us in the silence of Advent, in the silence of grief, than the Blessed Mother of Jesus?
Our Lady enshrined Him within her womb. At His death, she could not soothe His suffering, except by her heart united to His will, until the very end, even as He was laid in a tomb. She waits to embrace us with the same maternal love that swaddled Him in his infancy, and held him at His death.
The Blessed Virgin Mary’s fiat was an act of perfect contemplation of the will of God. She placed the Savior of the World into the manger that night in poverty, in a spirit of humility and obedience, so that human creatures might be “partakers of the divine nature” by the Incarnation of the Word made flesh (CCC 460)
A personal invitation to hope
The Savior of the World came to us in infancy, in vulnerability. The Nativity of Our Lord’s birth is a pronouncement of God’s infinite love for us, and a personal invitation to mysterious wonder.
It is the essence of divine wonder in the way children anticipate spontaneous joy in the discovery of God’s creation as a visible sign of the miraculous: “To children it seems perfectly natural that God’s thoughts should become snow and water and stars; and creation itself is simply His meditation on Christ (Houselander 71).
In the darkness, expect God to come to the manger of your heart, and hold Him close. Press the Sacred Heart of Jesus close to your heart, and let Him embrace your “Why?” as the wonder and the power of His love transforms your own ‘hard winter,’ giving birth to peace and joy—“so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
