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Advent
A time to wake up
By DIRK DUNFEE
In the first stage of my Jesuit
training I helped out in the kindergarten at a Catholic grade school in
Denver’s inner city. Naptime is a central feature of kindergarten life.
Naptime at Loyola Grade School was memorable for being both a respite and an
ordeal. The respite was the 15-minute oasis of calm and quiet in the middle of
an otherwise chaotic day. The ordeal came in the form of little Joshua, our own
5-year-old Rip Van Winkle. He’d fall into such a deep sleep that waking
him was a major effort. The school nurse said there was nothing medically wrong
with him. And the job wasn’t over once Joshua’s eyes were finally
open. Left to his own devices, he’d go right back to sleep, drifting away
while the other children were getting their shoes on and putting away their
sleeping mats. Once fully and resolutely awake, Joshua was a delightful child.
The hard part was getting him awake, and keeping him awake for those first
crucial minutes.
For years I thought of Advent primarily as a time of waiting, and
a time of expectation. Not anymore, at least not primarily. Perhaps I’ve
grown tired, cranky and impatient. Perhaps I’ve just come to realize the
importance of awareness and wakefulness. Advent is about getting awake.
There’s no indication in scripture that Jesus put much stock
in waiting. I’m not even sure he was a patient person. He was
understanding and he surely appreciated the complexities of the human heart,
but he was altogether too filled with the urgency of it all to be interested in
waiting for things to happen on their own or in waiting to see what people
would do. And so he counsels not patience, but wakefulness and watchfulness.
That he does so in his final days on earth, after letting his followers know
that he expects to suffer a brutal and ignominious death, only heightens the
urgency of his plea.
Whether we call it getting awake, or looking for God in all things
or simple awareness, there’s no substitute for an attitude of graceful
vigilance. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, though. Getting awake and staying
awake aren’t easy. Institutions, whether commercial, political or
religious, seem to thrive on our being somnolent, impressionable and pliable.
For all the talk of “truth” out there, most of us exist in a world of
illusion, fostered in part by television, our most pervasive medium, and one
that specializes in illusion. The problem is that we can’t deal with
things as they are until we see them as they are, and we know next to nothing
if we’re lost in some televised dreamland. If we’re getting all our
news from AOLCNNTimeWarnerViacomDisney, we’re still sleeping. If
we’re accepting uncritically what others tell us about the state of the
world or the state of our nation or the state of our church, we’re still
sleeping. A sleeping child makes a sweet picture, but sooner or later sleeping
children have to wake up.
Sometimes, though not very often, we wake up mostly on our own.
More and more Americans are beginning to question the wisdom, and even the
Christian propriety, of our government’s proposed new initiative in our
ongoing (though as yet undeclared) war against Iraq. More and more Christians
are beginning to wonder whether going to war is ever an appropriate Christian
response. Some of us are waking up -- the trick now is not to drift back to
sleep.
Sometimes events serve to shake us awake. The ongoing mess in the
Catholic church has done so for many of us. There was a time when I believed
that the church was nearly perfect and always had been. Like so many Catholics,
I knew next to nothing about church history, and even thought that the Second
Vatican Council was mostly about celebrating Mass in English. Now I’m
awake. The trick is not to drift back to sleep.
Advent doesn’t have much to recommend it if it’s nothing
more than passively waiting for Christmas. Christmas will be here soon enough.
It’s already here at the mall. We don’t need another lesson in
waiting. Patience is fine if you’re baking bread or helping a child learn
to walk. It won’t do if you’re trying to save the world. What you
need then is to get awake, and to stay awake. To stay awake, you have to be
engaged, you have to pay attention, and you have to be smart. Like Joshua. Like
Jesus.
Jesuit Fr. Dirk Dunfee is minister to the Jesuit community at
Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo.
National Catholic Reporter, November 29,
2002
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