(The Nationalist, December 2003)
In 1979, I was returning to Ireland on leave from Zambia with a confrere of mine. We detoured to the Holy Land to visit the places associated with Jesus. Among them was the Shepherds’ Field, outside Bethlehem. According to local tradition, this was where the shepherds gathered, watching their flocks, on the night Jesus was born. An angel told them of the birth of a saviour, the messiah, the Lord. And the shepherds heard the angels’ hymn, ‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’.
A church has been built in that field, small but beautiful. There my companion and I celebrated Mass. We said a Gloria, the angels’ hymn of praise to God: ‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’. Where else could it be as appropriate? Part way through, we heard booming sounds echoing across the sky. Thunder? Explosions? We didn’t know, but, when we had finished Mass, we asked. It was neither, they said, but the noise of Israeli air force jets breaking through the sound barrier on their way to bomb Lebanon. It was a disappointing and disturbing clash with the spirit of the place.
Life has many such disappointments. We want to take hold of things and put them right, and it is good that we do. And yet there is the fear that, despite our good intentions, we may end up making things worse than before.
Advent, the period of four weeks before Christmas, is about waiting. The Dutch priest, Henri Nouwen, wrote of it: ‘To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude towards life. It is trusting that something will happen to us that is beyond our imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God moulds us according to his love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our imagination or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance in a world preoccupied with control’. (Henri Nouwen, The Path of Waiting, DLT, London, 1995.)
A good thought, surely, but it becomes true only if we let it, and that involves listening to what God is saying and doing to us in the silence of our hearts.