A Reflection for Saturday of the Thirty-Fourth Week in Bizarre Time
Find today’s readings here.
“Beware that your hearts don’t grow to be drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of each day life,
and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” (Lk 21:34-35)
Well, folks, here we’re: the very last day of the church’s liturgical 12 months. Most individuals marked the occasion last Sunday through the Feast of Christ the King, but we still had six more days within the lectionary until the First Sunday of Advent. Today’s readings are for you, reading this email, and the faithful remnant who go to each day Mass on Saturday, but not the Sunday vigil (I assume a few of you’re on the market). Advent starts tomorrow, but let’s linger in Bizarre Time for just just a few more hours.
Today’s readings, like most readings in November, are quite apocalyptic. Regardless that it may well seem to be Scripture is pointing toward a day that’s long off in the longer term, Jesus is giving us directions on learn how to live within the here and now. Yes, the day of reckoning is coming (and it seems like it’s gonna hurt: “For that day will assault everyone”), but we’re instructed to live in such a way now: “Beware that your hearts don’t grow to be drowsy, from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of each day life.”
Regardless that it may well seem to be Scripture is pointing toward a day that’s long off in the longer term, Jesus is giving us directions on learn how to live within the here and now.
“Beware that your hearts don’t grow to be drowsy.” What does a drowsy heart feel like? Speaking from experience, I even have just a few ideas. A drowsy heart is distracted and worn down. It is restricted in its vision and skill to like. It appears like walking in a circle, lost. It invites pity on itself. It longs for love and healing and knows not learn how to ask.
In some unspecified time in the future, all of us have felt like this. Perhaps you’ve a drowsy heart coming into this Advent season. Perhaps the 12 months has totally beaten you down and also you desperately need a retreat, but as a substitute are faced with the relentless end-of-year craze.
Advent is a season of waiting, of preparation. Now, there are a minimum of 3 ways you’ll be able to wait for something. One is trembling, just wait until your father gets home, anxious fear of punishment. One other way is sort of a spouse waiting for a partner to return from an extended business trip, preparing a warm meal and awaiting an overdue embrace. A 3rd approach to waiting, which I’m calling the drowsy-heart method, is to totally put something out of sight, out of mind. It’s like procrastinating on a final paper until the night before, once you realize that you simply’ve got to write down 10,000 words in 8 hours (in the event you are a former professor of mine reading this, then this is unquestionably purely hypothetical).
Of those three options, which most describes your relationship with God’s coming this 12 months? Perhaps as we wrap up the liturgical 12 months today, as we rake the leaves, eat the leftovers, and hang the Christmas lights, allow us to ask God to focus our hearts within the here and now, to remodel our drowsy hearts so crammed with anxiety into ones with burning desire.
