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

Come to the Table

Dear Friends, 

We think about tables around Thanksgiving time. This year, whether we eat at a crowded table or at work or alone, let us name our past meal companions. Reach back to the tables of your past. Remember that everything happens at the table.  

Here is a poem by Joy Harjo, our first Native American poet laureate.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

~ Susan Schantz, SSJ

https://www.poetrycenter.org/at-table-poems-inspired-by-us-poet-laureate-joy-harjo/