Bulletin column from November 28, 2021

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! Among the more famous reflections and meditations on the Lord’s Prayer is found in Saint Teresa of Avila’s book The Way of Perfection. In this spiritual classic, she comments that when one prays the Lord’s Prayer, and utters the phrase “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,” then one must be truly ready for God’s Kingdom to come even if it does not come as we expect it to.

To underscore the point that there is no messing around when it comes to the coming of the Kingdom, and to obedience to God’s most holy will, Teresa offers an example from the Lord’s own life: his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Lord prays and asks his Father if it is possible for the suffering that is coming to pass him by, but quickly adds that if it is not, then “thy will be done.” In the Garden we find our King ushering in his Kingdom with radical openness to the divine will, an openness that accepts the suffering that comes with the phrase: “thy will be done.”

This weekend the Church embarks upon yet another Advent journey. This is the season of “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.” We cannot sincerely pray for the coming of the Kingdom according to the divine will, which is perfect, if we are not willing to accept the implications of such a move. To pray for the coming of the Kingdom is to understand that our King does not at all like competing kingdoms and that as he encounters them in any way, shape, or form he dismantles them. This process of dismantling always involves suffering because it requires the removal of things to which we are inordinately attached. This is true on the level of the individual person and also on the broader level of entire social systems.

All this by way of saying that for us Christians who are Advent people, we are blessed with a different perspective about why things happen like they do. If we find ourselves at the moment with questions in our hearts about why so much around us, and within us, seems so disrupted, why the social order seems so battered, why we seem at every turn these days to have to adjust our expectations about even the most basic routines of life, then we can rest upon the conviction that God is busy bringing about his Kingdom, and this is how it looks.

No one enjoys supply chain disruptions, rising prices, labor issues, political instability, unraveling social norms, and the broad questioning of what have been fundamental Western assumptions about life itself. All of this is its own type of suffering to be sure. The perspective of the Season of Advent encourages us to consider that maybe it is the case that all that we are currently going through is how God is choosing to dislodge whatever is opposed to his reign so that he can replace it with what is instead fashioned after his will.

His Kingdom does not come as an abstraction. Many times in life God is the great disruptor because he knows there is no other way to pry us free from our attachments to all that diminishes our true flourishing in grace. To offer one example: wouldn’t it be amazing if an outcome of our current set of difficulties is that we all learn to be content with less and to be more patient when plans change? We might just end up as more joyful and grateful people. One does not end up at that point without first passing through the cross of letting go, and our culture is undergoing that cross right now. Advent is an invitation to accept disruptions as a grace and as a sign of the coming of our great King with his Kingdom. He loves us and our world too much to leave it just as it is. He wants to claim every shred of it, and of us, for himself. Into Advent we go: thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.