Today, as we begin Advent and the new Church year, the readings the Church gives us tries to make us more attentive to, hopeful about, and prepared for the moment of the great advent of God, the second coming of Christ. God has come to us, God will come to us again, but we must also make our pilgrimage to God.
Our pilgrimage to God, or our coming to Him, is envisioned as climbing a mountain, a mountain which is above all other hills. Listen again to Isaiah:
“In days to come,/ the mountain of the Lord’s house/ shall be established as the highest mountain/ and raised above the hills./ All nations shall stream toward it;/ many peoples shall come and say:/ “Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain,/ to the house of the God of Jacob,/ that he may instruct us in his ways,/ and we may walk in his paths.”
This prophecy envisions the coming of Jesus and our going to Him as the most important thing that everyone in the world would have as their top priority in their lives. Jesus said “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment” (Matt 22:37-38) Which is really to keep our focus on the Lord, constantly moving towards Him, up His mountain.
Well clearly that isn't the case for everyone, some days it isn't even the case in my own life, but God wants it to be, and in our minds we might want it to be, but our hearts often aren't there.
Our minds often focus on lesser hills, turning to smaller, less important things, much like the people of Noah’s generation who were so immersed in the ordinary and everyday that they were unaware of the flood of evil that was gradually encroaching on their lives.
How do we get there to where we keep the Lord our God as our highest priority? How do we prevent ourselves from falling asleep in our pilgrimage of faith?
Well, in the first paragraph of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est, he makes a crucial assertion: Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but rather the encounter with the Person of Christ; this encounter gives our life a new horizon and a decisive direction. In another place, he adds that our initial encounter with Christ finds its source and summit in the celebration of the Eucharist.
The philosopher Louis Lavelle observes that the most significant event of most people’s lives is an “encounter with another” who suddenly throws new light upon their lives and changes their direction and meaning.
This is the reason why encounter is the very method of the Incarnation - God’s permanent method which we celebrate at Christmas, and why we have this season of Advent to prepare. “God tirelessly calls each person to this mysterious encounter with Himself” (CCC 2591). An encounter makes us wonder what we are really looking for in life, asking ourselves which mountain is really the highest?
And the person in the encounter who prompts that question is in some way a key to the answer. We recognize an encounter by the way it never loses its attraction for us, despite the passing of time.
An encounter opens wide our whole heart and soul. It energizes our reason. It reignites our wonder. We can “see inside” things; we are no longer held hostage by our anxiety, our pessimism, our pettiness. An encounter bonds us with some- thing beyond us. It “launches” us, setting our freedom free.
In Flannery O'Connor's short story entitled “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the main character is a twelve-year-old girl referred to as “the child.” She is highly intelligent but also lonely, resentful and mean-spirited.
She and her mother go to visit the local convent, where they are met by a kind nun who hurries them down the corridor to Adoration. The child cynically thinks to herself, “You put your foot in the door and they got you praying.”
But as soon as she kneels before the monstrance, “her ugly thoughts” stop, and she begins to pray, “Help me not to be so mean. Help me not to give my mother so much sass. Help me not to talk like I do.” Gazing out the car window as they drive home that evening, the child looks at the horizon and the sun: “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood.”
Thanks to her encounter with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, she sees the Eucharist in everything. The encounter of the Eucharist gave her life “new direction.”
And this is the thing, sometimes we have to start climbing the mountain in order to get that new perspective, to gain a new horizon which is God’s.
There are lots of hills, lots of different things which fight for our attention, but it is our job to recognize the most important, the highest, the mountain of the Lord, and keep striving to climb it, not falling asleep ahead of His second coming, but continuing to grow in our perspective, which is really God’s perspective.
As we begin this new Church year, this season of Advent, what changes can we make to climb the highest mountain?