Nov 30, 2008
Advent is about the two comings of Christ. We often think of prepartion for Christ’s birth. Jesus has already been born. We as Christians don’t pretend each year that Jesus needs to be born again. Instead we reflect upon Christ’s birth, Christ’s second coming, & how we are in between these two events.
The readings especially the gospel makes perfect sense when we realize that advent is about Jesus’ second coming. Jesus says be watchful, we do not know the day or the hour, but we should be ready.
There seems to be many stories regarding saints who are asked the question. What would you do if you knew that Jesus was coming in the next 10 minutes? When Theresa of Avila was asked this, she supposedly was eating chicken. She said that she would remain eating chicken. Charles Borromeo was playing pool. He said that he would remain playing pool. If we were asked this question would we have the same confidence or would we rush to find a priest.
People might say what is the difference between being a good person & being a Christian? One difference may be our ability to have a better perspective on life & death. If we are Christian, we have a greater understanding of the meaning of our life. We do not put all of our hopes on this life, because we know something better follows.
I recently had a conversation with the chaplain of Salt Lake Regional in the ICU ward about our personal views about end of life procedures. We both agreed that we do not want to be intubated, put on any machine, or have our life prolonged by any extraordinary means. When we stop breathing one day, it is just our time. We feel this way because of our ministry to the dying. We have both seen awful, gruesome deaths for people who held on to life for too long. One of the jobs of being a chaplain is to walk with people who have a family member who is dying. When someone is dying in a family it can either be a grace filled experience or it can be horrifying experience, sometimes depending upon if the family has prepared for their loved one’s death & if they are people of faith. Many times as a priest, I have witnessed families put their loved ones through added pain & suffering because they will not allow them to die. They cannot let them go, because there is something that is unresolved in their relationship. Because they have not prepared for their death nor the death of their loved one, they want their loved one to have every possible treatment regardless of the hopelessness of the case. They might say the extra treatments could not hurt, but actually they cause much added suffering for their loved one. They might get one more day or several months, but the remainder of their days is in an expensive ICU ward hooked up to a breathing machine.
We as Christians know that we await the fullness of life, & it is not here. We long for heaven. We are watchful & waiting, so that we are not taken unaware that this life will end. We attempt to live our lives to the fullness as a response of gratitude to God, yet we don’t hold onto it with such force that we are not able let go when our time has come. We have little anxiety knowing that we are in the hands of God.
Our life here on earth is a perpetual advent because we wait for the Kingdom of heaven revealed through the first & second coming of Christ.