Looking Up and Looking Around

Dear Friends,

The season of Advent begins today. We usually think of Advent as the entrance to Christmas, but Advent has a distinctive character of its own. One of its themes can be summarized in two phrases:

Look up and look around.

These are two seemingly simple but actually difficult ways of living that Advent calls us to remember and practice.

In today’s responsorial Psalm we pray:

Make me know your ways, O Lord,

And teach me your paths. (Psalm 25.4a)

How will we know God’s ways and paths, if we don’t look up and look around? As a culture, it seems we have lost our daily breadth of vision. The ever-present in-our-hands cell phone makes us look downwards. People, old and young, walk down the street or in stores with eyes fixed on their phones. They sit at tables having a meal with others, while casting frequent glances at their phones, all the while missing the drama, joy and maybe even the goodness of life around them.

Arriving a little early for Mass, we tend to fold inward. We don’t see the stranger from another country who has recently arrived and is seated next to us. We don’t even say hello to friends seated nearby. In defense of our not paying attention to them, we say that we are in church to focus on God. True. But when we have a larger vision, we also embrace God within our neighbor.

Listening to people talk about the way they came to the voting booth in November, pocketbook issues were primary. I understand that. But was there room in our concern and our thinking for the big picture? Seeing more than our own needs can happen only when we look up or look around.

Next week, the prophet Baruch will alert the people to look up: “See your children gathered from the west and east.” (Baruch 5.5) In the Gospel, John the Baptist will appear, his preaching offering people a future beyond their imagining.

In the third week of Advent, we will again see John, this time looking up to see Jesus, coming to be baptized. Afterwards, Jesus looks around him, sees a desert and makes his way there, in order to keep his vision big enough to embrace everyone.

And finally on the fourth Sunday of Advent, we will see Mary and Elizabeth, meeting in joy because of the children they carried. Each could have been self-absorbed in her own joy, but as they looked at each other’s face, they knew, felt, intuited a bigness that was beyond them.

There we have it: each Sunday of Advent offering us a pathway to follow if only we look up and look around.

How about lifting our eyes, hearts and vision throughout this last month of the year to see the world in a deeply spiritual way, while a secular, end-of-the-year cultural celebration of Christmas would have us too distracted to do so.

Then, Christmas Day, when it finally comes, will become what it truly is, namely the beginning of realizing the many ways God-with-us surrounds us daily with love.

~ Sister Joan Sobala