Year B Advent 2
When I sit in that celebrant’s chair a sense of happiness settles over me. I’m so happy to be here, after all the years when I wasn’t sure I would be a priest again and all the struggles to be received into the Church, and here I am at Epiphany with all you beautiful people and I get to pray with you and we all get to be catholic.
That said – I’m starting to catch on to you all.
Last week, I started the homily by making a joke about how people who are already listening to Christmas music are probably crazy or something, and then during that same mass, a cell phone started playing Christmas music! Message received. Don’t even get me started, though, about how that same weekend at another mass during the consecration a cell phone stared playing that old, classic ring tone exactly at the moment I consecrated the Precious Blood and held the chalice up. If you want to be an altar server and ring the bells, just let me know! We’ll sign you up.
We priests are fussy, we want everything to go perfect, especially with liturgy. But often what happens instead is a little hiccup here or there. I read the wrong thing in the missal, or the altar boy forgets to bring the book over…I remember at the very first wedding I ever witnessed, I dropped one of the rings on the ground when the best man handed them to me. It made a sharp, pinging noise when it hit the floor and then kind of rolled around for a bit. It was super embarrassing. But you know what? That couple, who happen to be my younger brother and sister-in-law, are still happily married. So they survived. When we make little mistakes, too, we survive. In fact, that’s part of the joy of it, because we’re a family and families grow to love these little quirks about each other.
In the human soul, too, which comes out through the particular actions we choose to take – remember, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks – mistakes are made. These are more serious. The shape of the human soul can be imperfect, almost as if a child has drawn us and colored outside the lines. There are peaks and valleys there, right? I don’t know if any of you like GK Chesterton’s Father Brown, but there’s an episode in which he talks about how a particular object is “the wrong shape,” meaning that it had lost its purpose. CS Lewis is similar when he talks about original sin causing a person to become “bent.”
At one time in my life, I decided that I could frame up the walls in the basement of our house and finish the basement on my own. I didn’t even have a nail gun, and because I’m crazy, just went on ahead and hammered every nail by hand. Thousands of them. Occasionally, I’d strike one wrong and it would bend, and a bent nail is impossible to hammer into place.
The human soul, when it is bent, cannot fulfill its purpose. We are jars of clay, says St. Paul, made to hold a valuable treasure. We are fitted to a purpose, but because of original sin our souls aren’t ready. They’re not shaped right and cannot hold this great treasure, which is the presence of God himself in us, made possible by grace. When we’re baptized, the Church says that our souls are permanently changed, they are re-shaped by the Holy Spirit. What sin had bent out of shape, grace made straight.
If it was that simple we’d all be on easy street. But God isn’t content to simply call us holy – because he loves us, he also wants to make us holy, and unfortunately even after original sin is driven out we choose to continue to fill up the empty space with subsequent sins. The change God seeks for us happens from the inside out, and it is why we spend our lives battling against sin and seeking virtue.
There’s a tension that we all feel. We an finite creatures – we live and we die – but our souls are shaped for eternity. St. Augustine says that we are restless until our hearts rest in the divine. We are made by height and measure but God doles out his grace in limitless quantities. He’s like a fire in our hearts that we must carefully nourish and guard, because God is dangerous. He will turn our lives upside down. Be ready for it.
Make straight the paths of the Lord, is what St. John the Baptist cries. Why is this so important? Because Our Lord is coming by a straight path whether we have prepared it or not. If we aren’t ready for him, if our souls are crooked and bent, his advent will be a painful experience.
At the very beginning of his Divine Comedy, Dante writes, “At the mid-point of the path through life, I found/ Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way/ Ahead was blotted out.” In other words, he was lost. He didn’t know where to find the path, and he seemed to have lost sight of God. Over the course of the poem, he meets a guide named Virgil who is going to show him the way.
“Beyond the purging flames of which you tell—
In sight of Peter’s Gate, though that relief
Demands for prelude that I go through Hell.
And then he moved, and then I moved as well.”
Virgil pointed Dante on the straight path to heaven, but the path went first through Hell so that he could understand the gravity of sin, then through purgatory so he could see the way in which the saints were being made ready, and finally he stands gazing at presence of God in heaven. Making the path straight included repentance and penance. Are we willing to pay that cost?
Notice something interesting about our reading from Mark today, it is the very beginning of the Gospel. The good news about Jesus begins by asking us the same question. Are you willing to pay that cost? Are you willing to renounce your sins? Are you ready to straighten out your soul? Such is our path to salvation.
Prepare the way of the Lord.
Pondus Meum Amor Meus 