The season leading up to the birth of Christ is called Advent, derived from Latin ad + venire (to come). Something worth noting is coming up. Even waiting can make one’s soul tingle, anticipating even God!
Sadly, Advent often gets run over by the sin of buying, shopping, shoving, crowding, crowing. Sin is whatever separates us from the goodness in ourselves, God and our neighbors. Preoccupation with over-shopping blinds us to this goodness.
In this country we’ve overstuffed ourselves, offered thanks, and now head for a shopping day we nervously call Black Friday—now extended for weeks. We also have witnessed SEVEN days of SEVEN mass murders—one per day. We have witnessed world starvation and weather events of mass destruction. We are traumatized. What will bring hope and healing?
Can collective prayer be a "weapon"? Dare we openly, out loud, barrage the God we usually thank and praise with a prayer assault, a prayer war? Love, divine and human, is best of course, yet how much Love is too much Love before it becomes empty of truth? I don’t know.
Apparently neither does Jesus who, in the face of fear and questioning about ongoing apocalyptic chaos, says: “I don’t know. No one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, only the Father.” (Mt.24:36) I find this harsh truth oddly comforting. I cannot know exactly why trauma and tragedy and unbearable loss happen, even if I can exactly describe and analyze the circumstances. So I live at the edge of unknowing. No one is ever condemned by God for wanting to know, for simply giving up, for wavering in faith, longing to know, or taking one’s own life.
* * * *
Once upon a time this lonely boy met this lonely girl. In their loneliness they found love. In the love they had found fun and laughter and marriage which, in the 1960s, meant they had to play house—he to work for money and she to home to cook and clean. Years went by. They had their money and their beautiful children, but they no longer could see each other clearly through the dense mist of fear and tears that—slowly slowly— had settled around them. They turned away from each other, said goodbye to each other, to the love they once had and would never forget, but reinvested it in their children and in new love.
* * * *
I wonder if this is what Jesus’s followers did when they remembered that he once told them that the world as they knew it would come to an end, never be the same, and no one knew exactly when, why or how, except God who is silent.
I’m annoyed but not depressed or helpless. I’ve been tempted to choose atheism or feign weak agnostic faith, but damn it, I can’t. Woe is me. And so I pray.
Prayer will be my weapon, instead of knowledge. Prayer will be my faith-of-unknowing.
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