The Door Only You Can Open

Dear Friends,

During the course of an average day, you and I open and close at least a dozen doors. To open and close a door is an easy, natural, unthinking act – unless we have forgotten our key or our arms are too full to manage it.

Doors are an integral part of life. They are passageways from where we have been to where we want to go. They offer us privacy and protection from unwanted elements, like the thief who wants to break into a home that Jesus tells us about in today’s gospel.

Doors are also instruments of power. We shut people out or let them in.

Advent is a season for opening some doors and closing others.

It is time to open the door to a deeper, stronger relationship with our Coming God and to open our hearts to people in new or renewed friendship and reconciliation. It is a time to open ourselves to new attitudes, practices and ways of thinking that birth a future full of hope, and to close ourselves off from destructive tendencies.

The scene portrayed at the head of this blog shows Jesus standing at the door and knocking. At the door of the human heart, Jesus knocks and waits for an invitation to enter. If we take a good look at the door in the picture, we see there is no knob on the outside. The door to the human heart can only be opened from within. We have the power to welcome or refuse entry. In order to hear Jesus’ knock, we need to be awake! Jesus tells us so in today’s Gospel: be awake to His coming here and now, awake to His coming when the kin-dom of God is fully formed, awake to celebrate His Incarnation, His Birth once in history

The knock comes and we react to it in different ways. We may be cautious, curious to see who is there, irritated to be interrupted, ashamed that our house is not in order. We may be curt at the door, guarded, fearful, elated. Or we may ignore the knock completely. Go away, God! I don’t want to see You today.

You may think that this idea of opening some doors and closing others is a mild-mannered approach to Advent. Not really.

Two doors immediately come to mind that require personal, hard work to close:

1. Close the door to noise, even briefly, every day and welcome quiet to let the hidden gifts of the season seep into our beings.

2. Close the door to violence. Isaiah in today’s first reading gives us the appealing image of beating our swords into plowshares. Without urging, violence in our world will continue. We need not support it, participate in it, buy it nor give it a place in our homes.

The divine visitor is at our Advent door.

We need only to open it wide with our welcome.

~ Sister Joan Sobala