The End of Our Worlds

 Advent is the liturgical season that celebrates the theme of divine light.  This great light, incarnated in Jesus, confronts any kind of darkness, illusion, ignorance.  If you reflect for a moment on the natural cycles of life, our world is always coming to an end.  The world of the womb comes to an end at birth; the world of infants comes to an end at about three; childhood comes to an end at adolescence; adolescence at young adulthood; young adulthood at the mid-age crisis; then comes old age, senility and death.  Life is a process.  The experience of growing up and the decline of physical energy forces us to let go of each period of life as we pass through it.  Thus, physical life is always giving way to further development.  It should be no surprise therefore that Jesus invites us to let the privatized worlds of our emotional attachments, preconceived ideas and pre-packaged values come to an end.

 One of the messages of Advent, especially the one about the end of the world, is not so much about “the” end of the world – nor even about physical death which is the end of the world for each of us – as about all the worlds that come to an end in the natural evolution of life.  Thus, every time we move to a new level of faith, the previous world that we lived in with all its relationships also comes to an end.  This is what John the Baptist and later Jesus meant when they began their ministry with the world “Repent.”  The message they meant to convey was “It’s the end of your world!”  Naturally, we do not like to hear such news.  We say, “You’re crazy; get rid of this guy; we don’t like change.  Go away.”

 The process of conversion begins with genuine openness to change – to be open to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so our spiritual life is evolving.  Our psychological world is the result of natural growth, events over which we had no control in early childhood, and grade school. Grace, which is the presence and action of Christ in our lives, invites us to be ready to let go of where we are now and to be open to the new values that are born when we penetrate to a new understanding of the Gospel and how it applies concretely to our daily lives.  Moreover, Jesus calls us to repent not just once; it is a message that keeps recurring.  The grace of Christ relentlessly calls us beyond our limitations and fears into new worlds.  Like Abraham, the classical paradigm of faith, Jesus asks us to leave land, family, culture, peer group, religious education, everything that we might cling to in order to have an identity or to avoid feeling lonely.  All of this Christ gently but firmly calls us to leave saying, “Go forth from your father’s house and country and come into the land that I will show you.”  The call to contemplative prayer is a call into the unknown.  It is not a call to nowhere, but it is nowhere that we can imagine.  Hence, our resistance.

 It is a gilt-edged invitation.  Each time you consent to an enhancement of faith, your world changes and all your relationships have to be adjusted to the new perspective and the new light that has been given you.  Our relationship to ourselves, to Jesus Christ, to our neighbor, to the Church – to God – all change.  It is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in.  Sometimes the Spirit of God deliberately shatters one of these worlds.  If we have depended upon them to go to God, it may feel as if we have lost God.  We may have doubts about God’s very existence.  Such doubts may be the best thing that has ever happened to us.  It is not the true God of faith we have doubts about, but only the God of our limited concepts or dependencies; this God never existed anyway.

And so the second part of Jesus’ message is very important.  If you repent and are willing to change, or willing to let God change you, the kingdom of God is close; in fact, you have it; it is within you and you can begin to enjoy it.  The kingdom of God belongs to those who are poor in spirit, who have let go of their possessive attitude toward everything, including God.

~Fr. Thomas Keating, 1988