We've gone back to the first pages of the lectionary - the book of readings, and the missal - the book of Mass-prayers. Dorothy Day said, "We are always beginning again." Beginning again suggests that we are alive.
Sometimes the experience or need to begin again is felt deeply and personally. We want to feel that life can begin again after a failed marriage. We begin life again after a regimen of chemotherapy has ended. When we move to a new home, hoping to make new friends. When we begin a new job. When we start a new prescription. When we set out into sobriety. After the death of a loved one.
Sometimes the need for a new beginning is communal. The nation needs to begin again after these days of awful division. That beginning might feel a long way off. We seem to have forgotten what it means to be an American.
The Church needs to begin again out of the sex abuse crisis. One Orthodox priest has said the Church has become so layered with teachings, rules, institutional problems and expectations, that we need to start all over with the simplest understandings about God and humankind.
Soon we'll begin again cosmically with the mid-December, minute -by-minute increase of light. The message of the Advent-Christmas time says: In all of our beginning-again-stories, God is there for us to discover - God who is faithful and sure in a deep love that has joined us at Bethlehem.
And in much of the country this weekend, there's snow. In symbology, snow is an image of the link between heaven and earth, or the coming down of divinity into humanity. There are not separate divine and human compartments, but like blanketing snow, everything that is human is covered with divinity. Maybe these Advent days, we could remember to look for signs of this.
But snow is only one form of water. Water can change. It can be liquid, solid (like snow and ice) or gas. And we're largely comprised of water. We can change too. and not just outwardly as we age or grow physically. We can change inwardly.
Change is always at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. We can say that at Bethlehem, God has changed his way of being with us. All of Christ's miracles are about changing—water changed to wine, the blind man coming to see, the excluded leper having community restored, the little bit of bread and fish changed into a huge and satisfying meal for thousands. And of course, at the center of our common lives, bread and wine are changed to the Body and Blood of Christ himself.
So, as we're beginning again—opening ourselves to the Biblical word, our personal prayer and our communal prayer here—we might wonder about our changing, which means our growing, evolving and maturing into God's imagined idea of each of us and all of us.
Advent is an interior time - a contemplative time. We spoil it with too much Christmas too soon. A Catholic periodical arrived this week with a whole page dedicated to people being asked, 'When is the right time to decorate for Christmas?"
As the world goes, this isn't one of the big questions. But it does focus for us that Christmas can come too soon, and for that we will have missed the contemplative aspect of Advent—the personal beginning again and the heart-desire for growth and change.
