As we prepare for Christmas
As preparations for the Christmas celebrations are underway it is essential to go deeper into the heart of these festivities in order to see how we are or should be preparing for the coming of the promised Messiah, the Son of God made man, Jesus Chris, Our Only Lord and Saviour! One of the authors which personally is helping me a great deal to make room for Jesus in my heart is certainly my fellow franciscan brother, and one of the most popular contemporary spiritual authors and speakers, Fr. Richard Rohr OFM.
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
In his very thorough book entitled Preparing for Christmas: Daily Reflections for Advent, Rohr gives us some very deep insights as to how we can live Advent realistically. He tells us straightaway: “Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus”. The real meaning of Advent is one wherein we roll our sleeves to get at the job of focusing on our expectation and anticipation on “the adult
Christ, the Cosmic Christ” who challenges us to empty our egoistical and indifferent self, in other words, to loose ourselves in Him and surrender totally to His saving will!
Profoundly inspired by the Bible Richard Rohr encourages us to let Christ’s ways of seeing things be our own during this Advent. It is only when we leap into Christ’s mentality and live by its parameters that we truly kick off a process of interior transformation. He writes: “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
One the first immediate results of this living into new ways of thinking, which Christ offers to us, is surely that of envisaging every single day as a Christmas celebration. “The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it ‘Always Advent,’ but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.” But what does this living every day, as a Christmas celebration, entail for you and me? It demands, from you and me, a life intensely immersed into love and forgiveness.
“Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.”
Obviously, love and forgiveness offer us big problems to contend with. Let us not forget that, contemporary society, is gearing us all the time to be consumers rather than being with and for God in others. In fact, Rohr observes: “We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible. We have created a pseudohappiness, largely based in having instead of being. We are so overstimulated that the ordinary no longer delights us. We cannot rest or abide in our naked being in God, as Jesus offers us.”
For Rohr, in order to be liberated from this pseudohappiness, which is undoubtedly making us cranky consumers, instead of human beings, as we were meant to be, we should start discovering the basic attitude of “resting.” He says: “We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb ‘rest,’ as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.”
Real resting will never confine us into ourselves, away from every fruitful initiative towards others. Rohr is very alert on this point when he reminds us: “Jesus is not telling us to believe unbelievable things, as if that would somehow please God. He is much more saying to us, ‘Try this,’ and you will see for yourself that it is true. But that initial trying is always a leap of faith into some kind of action or practice.”
Hence, what makes that course of action special, as it were, is that leap of faith. Furthermore, that leap of faith implies that good has to be called by its name and reckoned with as such, whereas evil must be recognized as evil and is to be avoided at all cost!
“Don’t name darkness good, which is the seduction that has happened to many of our people on both left and right. They have not been taught wisdom or discernment for the most part. The most common way to release our inner tension is to cease calling darkness darkness and to pretend it is passable light. Another way to release your inner tension is to stand angrily, obsessively against it, but then you become a mirror image of it.
Everyone can usually see this but you! Our Christian wisdom is to name the darkness as darkness, and the Light as light, and to learn how to live and work in the Light so that the darkness does not overcome us.”
Rohr powerfully asserts that “without action and lifestyle decisions, without concrete practices, words are dangerous and largely illusory.” But why he is so much adamant on action? Let us not forget that action helps us to go out of ourselves, away from our faulty self-image. That is why this great spiritual author cautions us against this horrible trap!
“One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image—either positively or negatively created. We have to begin with some kind of identity, but the trouble is that we confuse this idea of ourselves with who we actually are in God. Ideas about things are not the things in themselves. We all have to start by forming a self-image, but the problem is our attachment to it, our need to promote it and protect it and have others like it. What a trap!”
Thus, if attachment to our erroneous self-image is one of the greatest dangers to our spiritual progress what are we to do in order not to fall into this trap? Rohr invites us to go back to our real selves, namely that of being the children of God.
“Their self-image was based on mere psychological information instead of theological truth. What the Gospel promises us is that we are objectively and inherently children of God (see 1 John 3: 2). This is not psychological worthiness; it is ontological, metaphysical and substantial, and cannot be gained or lost. When this given God image becomes our self-image, we are home free, and the Gospel is just about the best good news that we can hope for!”
It is such a saving and most powerful reality that will save us from our moods and existential fluctuations. We need to let Advent remind us that “whenever we get defensive or go emotionally up and down, this is a sign that we are attached to a self-image.” Hence, something of our own making. On the contrary, when we revert to our real ontological self, that of being the children of God, “the more ... we can put together, the more ... we can ‘forgive’ and allow, the more we can include and enjoy, the more we tend to be living in the Spirit.”
Only through, with and in Jesus Christ, God made man like you and me, that we can truly affirm, with our lives, that now we are free! What a marvellous news as we prepare for Christmas!