Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
December 1, 2024 | "The Advent of Advent"
What if the Advent season isn't just a countdown to Christmas, but a chance to truly begin anew in our spiritual lives? Explore the transformative power of Advent, a time for reflection and intentional living. By being mindful of the present moment, we can break free from the monotony of routines and embrace each day with renewed significance.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Fr Don Wolfe. Living Catholic is a fresh look at issues confronting each of us today. This show deals with living Catholic, what that means for Catholics, as well as the impact on the rest of society. You certainly don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this show. And now your host, Fr Don Wolfe to enjoy this show.
Speaker 1:And now your host, father Don Wolfe, welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, and we begin this new year of the church this Sunday as the first Sunday of Advent. The word Advent doesn't just mean something new. It means the beginning of something. The distinction may be minuscule in our day-to-day living, but it is significant. Even though we're standing once again on the precipice of Christmas and the turning of the calendar, we're also in the midst of beginning something new. The obvious is that we've never been here before. That is so obvious. It goes without saying, of course, we've never been here today, ever before. It's apart from any other day.
Speaker 1:But this truth often goes unappreciated, especially for those like us who live their lives continually connected to the days that come before this one. For us, the past is familiar territory. It's not foreign and hostile as it is to so many people, and because it is, we tend to allow it the past to blend into the present, so much that we're tempted to make the present simply the current moment of what will be the past, if we have been coasting into a secular world devoid of the appreciation of God's presence. Today will be one more confirmation of our temptation to forget God, because today will be just like yesterday. If we have allowed our awareness of the political sphere to descend into the worst examples of name calling and character assassination, then today will look no different than the previous 10,000 days. And if we presume on the ignorance and the obduracy of most people, so that we expect nothing else of them, we're going to mark all the hours of this date in the way our dates have been marked for the last many years. Walking into the present by looking backward over our shoulder is a guarantee to see only what we're accustomed to seeing, Even though we can flip the calendar and all the numbers advance. If the past is simply the precursor to today, nothing of today is going to be distinct from yesterday. We're, of course, tempted to do this by our celebration. It is the case that, as we gather at Mass, we can easily slip into the numb routine that we're most used to and put our hearts and minds into neutral, sliding into the celebration of Jesus as if it were of no more meaning than watching the reruns of the great OU Texas games from the early 2000s. We know the calls. Where the scores are familiar, they blend into sameness. After a while, what once may have been blood-pumping excitement becomes so tame we even forget that we could be motivated by it. Looking backwards, even when it's in color and motion, dulls today and our prayer together can become not much more than walking in circles.
Speaker 1:I was approached once by an older parishioner after Mass and he asked me why don't we do our funerals like other churches did? And I asked him what he meant. Did he think our funerals weren't sufficiently prayerful or holy enough, or were they too long? What did he have in mind? I've been to a lot of funerals in other places and the last thing I ever thought was that we needed to change what so many other places did and celebrate the person who had died. We didn't offer enough time to play videos and have people talk and go on about what the deceased has done in his life.
Speaker 1:He said A funeral he thought ought to be more specific and more pointed. More than anything, he didn't want to pray the regular prayers for the one who had died. He wanted everything to be more personal. Why can't we have it like they do, was his question, and it was good that he asked it. He was flirting with the challenge we face all the time. When we stand at Mass and direct our hearts to the goodness of God in our lives, we're turning to God as a matter of course. Who we are and what we do, these are not strange or foreign to God's care. In fact, over and over again, we approach the Lord in our needs and ask for the favor of his mercy and goodness. It can easily feel like a rote script with nothing of ourselves in it, and we all know we can slip into mindlessness when the prayers are familiar and rote, no matter how moving they are. He wanted to be sure that we're mindful at funerals, paying attention to the situation and noting the uniqueness of the one who died. He wanted us to jump out of the familiar and point our heads toward the different.
Speaker 1:The challenge, of course, is that the easiest thing to do is to become numb to its noise. No matter where we are or what we're doing, what's going on around us easily becomes empty to us and we don't notice. For example, when I was growing up next to Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, we lived in the flight path of the crosswind runway. The jets would come over our house as they were landing on that runway. Our relatives from Ocarsha would be sitting at the table as one of the airliners straightened out his wings from his crossed-wind leg and settled into his glide slope. And they would ask how do you put up with all the noise? And we'd sincerely ask them what noise? After a while, we never noticed. So it is with all the noise of the world it passes by and is gone and it's like it didn't happen at all. This is as true with regard to what is sincere and homey as it is with the rote and ritualized. Eventually, you can get used to anything that's said, anything that's done, and become inured to its impact. When the honeymoon is over and what was new becomes normal, it's easy to ignore its importance.
Speaker 1:For the parishioner concerned about funerals, he didn't take into consideration what funerals would be like if they were only as he imagined they should be Were funerals nothing but thinking about the one who had died, remembering what he'd done, showing pictures from his life and nothing more. After a while, every funeral would simply become one more version of the same story and we'd become numb to it. What he really wanted, although he didn't know it at the time was to be able to enter more fully into the depths of prayer in the face of death. He really wanted to be able to harvest the meaning of the tragedy of death in the face of the goodness of life, by knowing God's graces poured out to us in the promise of resurrection. All of these are part of the prayers we pray as we gather at any Catholic funeral. He'd simply not paused long enough to enter into them. Once the funeral mass began, he put himself on pause because he was looking back over his shoulder at all the other times he'd gone to funerals and he stopped looking ahead. What he needed to do in answer to his question was to take the time to look forward. The answer to his concern was to begin something new by praying for the one who died and praying for himself as someone who also will face the truth of death amidst life, which is the invitation that we first receive at Advent. We come together to start something new.
Speaker 1:As the church year begins its journey again, the eyes of our imagination should be turned back toward the future, not solely cast back over what we've already done or over the territory we've already covered. That's the first challenge of Advent that we're starting something new. If we need a good image of what we're doing, we should consider an ascending spiral. If we're looking at our movement from the top down, we move in a circle, and that seems more or less accurate. After all. We begin with Advent, we progress to Christmas, we pass into ordinary time, then we take up Lent and Holy Week, and then Easter, all the way to Pentecost, and all according to the calendar that we have. Just the same as when we buy any calendar with any design on it, it's going to have the months in succession, one after the other, in regular order. So also we go through the succession of seasons, beginning with Advent, but with each turn through the seasons we're also ascending. We're not simply slogging along the same pathways and through the same landscape as before. We're walking through new territory different than the last time we walked this pattern. Looking at our progress from the side, we'd see a rising spiral with every point on it different than the one previous. When we begin Advent, we're at a new place than we were the year before. We're headed toward unexplored territory where we've never been before.
Speaker 1:As we all know, we follow a set of readings for Sunday that are part of a three-year cycle. In addition, the readings for daily Mass follow a two-year cycle. These ensure that we have the fullest opportunity to hear from all of the Gospels and Epistles, as well as the major portions of the prophets and historical books of the Bible. These readings are themselves a kind of separate pathway, a new set of stories and images that we enter into according to where we are in the cycle.
Speaker 1:I've often been asked if I save my sermons from all the cycles that we repeat. Every three years the mass readings for the weekends will be the same. It would be possible simply to repeat the sermons from the years before, and the joke among priests sometimes is that after the first three years of ordination they'd never have to write another sermon again. And perhaps there is a priest somewhere who has done that. But that's never worked for me, and the reason is obvious Because I don't hear the readings in the same way again and again. I'm not at the same place when those readings speak to me, so I can't preach the same sermon about them as I did before.
Speaker 1:I'm not walking in a circle, encountering the same scenery as before, finding the same things on my pathway. Instead, I'm walking a new journey every day. The people I meet, the situations I encounter and the person I have become are all different than previously. So when I hear of Jesus healing Bartimaeus or multiplying the loaves and fishes, or when I read of the women who come to the tomb on Easter morning, I'm not encountering these moments as the same person I was three years ago. In the intervening time. I have become different. So what I said in the previous cycle doesn't speak in the same way, in the same voice. In fact, what I said then isn't the me now at all. So I have to strive to preach what I find in that encounter according to my life and in my own voice at that time. At this time I'm living a life in Christ that's new, that's growing and progressing in my journey with him. From the previous years it's not that much different.
Speaker 1:As in any relationship, a married couple don't simply repeat their days and years together as if their lives together were nothing more than their first year of marriage multiplied 25 or 50 or 70 times. Everything about how they live and the way they respond to one another, all those things change as a product of their time together. It's hard to imagine how anyone could stay married or remain a friend or keep up with a brother, if a life together was only repeating the past and walking in the same paths as before. That's what makes reunions, the reunions that we go to, so often, disappointing, no matter how notable it might have been to pass through high school together, or fight in the same army unit, or live together in the same fraternity. Once the days are done, whatever life there was is finished. Unless there's some greater basis for deepening the relationship, there's not much future in simply recapitulating the time. We move forward into new territory, unexplored and unknown. That's what it means to build and sustain a relationship, which is what we're doing as we begin Advent.
Speaker 1:We don't live our lives as if we were marionettes in a stage play. Our lives are not performed according to a script already written in which we are but actors moving along by the influence of others who pull our strings. If this were the case, the point of living and any sense of direction would be meaningless. And if living were nothing but going through the same motions until we die, all initiative gone, all newness obliterated in the forced pathways we walk down, then there'd be nothing to living other than to mark when we woke up and went to bed. If this were the sum of life, we could measure all of it simply by knowing what year it was, because we'd already know everything else about it.
Speaker 1:Our relationship with God, that's what makes our lives. This is the saving truth we discover as we live in Christ. Entering into faith, we enter a relationship with God who accompanies us through the whole of life. We enter a relationship with God who accompanies us through the whole of life, walking with us as we grow in intimacy and wholeness in our experience of the divine. The great promise of this encounter with God is that we are not alone in life. We're promised the great accompaniment of God with us. So we grow in the relationship with God as our time together and our experience grows. As in any relationship, it takes time, but time is what leavens it as well.
Speaker 1:Relating to God doesn't just happen as if it were a lightning strike. We begin as we encounter God's presence. Our acceptance of the offer of friendship with God moves the relationship along the ups and downs of any relationship is part of this life in grace. Our acceptance of the offer of friendship with God moves the relationship along the ups and downs of any relationship is part of this life in grace, since our own sense of self and our personal capacity for growing waxes and wanes. But we're never simply the same.
Speaker 1:The spiritual life is, above all, a life, with all of its seasons and stages and parts. No-transcript. Besides all of that, we're encountering the world In all of its variety and intensity. The world is present to us and we run into it. We don't just pass by it and look at it. Living is a full-body sport, with hard contact and unmistakable certainty. We don't think our ways through the days and years. We push at them and they push back. Through the days and years. We push at them and they push back. No one is so set in his life that he simply flows through the challenges as if he were but fog filtering under the tree branches. He pushes and efforts and strains at what makes his life In fact. It's the pushing and straining that is his life. Going with God in life is making your way on this journey, finding your way and making it happen when we begin something new. That's what we're doing. This coming year is the new journey for us as we take up the challenge to progress with God and through all that we have not found before. It's the advent, the beginning of something new, and here are some hints about how to make it fruitful.
Speaker 1:First, pay attention. One of our problems, of course, is that we don't look up and we don't pay attention to what's happening in our lives. So many things come at us and there is so much to life that we cope by allowing most of it to rush by us. That's how we can get used to so much. We filter it out until we don't even see it anymore. Think about the last time you drove home from work. I'll bet if somebody had asked you about the details of the trip, you wouldn't be able to say anything at all about it. If, asked about the businesses on your route or the color of the leaves of the trees you passed or the number of cars ahead of you at the stoplight, you wouldn't be able to respond because you didn't see them, and you didn't because you weren't looking.
Speaker 1:There are so many things to pay attention to, so much thinking to do so much to remember and keep track of. You can safely ignore what's unimportant to you until it all passes in a blur. What we learn is to not pay attention. Unfortunately, this can be true of the heart of life as well. Relationships and friendships, loving moments and crucial communications, heartfelt words and meaningful gestures they can all disappear amidst the rush of life going past us. We can be so busy we don't even know we are on a journey and think we're simply staying in one place. Finding out we're actually going somewhere can be as mind-blowing as knowing we're on a huge ball spinning a thousand miles an hour and without moving moving a bit, we're going as fast as a rifle bullet.
Speaker 1:The only thing to do in order to appreciate the richness of our moments is to pay attention. This is often why monks and nuns spend so much time praying in silence and doing penance. They're trying to slow down enough to notice what's going on in their lives, just as everyone else. The pace of the world is so fast it leaves them breathless so much they can't find themselves. They pause as best they can and try to pay attention to their lives. We're invited to do the same thing. While we won't be invited to spend a month of intense praying, we do have the chance to notice that our lives are a journey toward a greater intimacy with God. If we can at least notice that we are going somewhere, we have a chance to appreciate the journey a little better. Pause long enough to notice that your world is not the same place as it was last year, and because it's not, neither are you. When that becomes evident, then notice that your relationship with God is not the same either, whether it's been rich and full or barely exists at all. Pause long enough to note that you're invited to make it deeper and into something richer. Pause, notice, see and then go.
Speaker 1:Don't fall into the trap of imagining that these are all recommendations for the special person who falls into that great trap of a category called spiritual. That word's a perfectly adequate adjective and is fine for everyone who wants to use it, but it tends to narrow down our understanding of the people it describes Technically. We're all spiritual persons, since we're all spirits, but put aside your thought that only those special people with special acuity are the ones for whom growing in relationship to God works. Advent is the invitation to begin, and it extends to everyone. Often we imagine that if we've mostly just gone through the motions of belief and have only just warmed to the pews, and even then not very often, none of those recommendations apply. And the talk about growing in prayer or coming to know God better is just prattle for people like that. But all relationships are made up of the ritualized and the formal, and they all contain a lot that isn't done or isn't focused on. If you haven't been passionate about living the life of faith, it only means that passion lies in the future. You can begin as well as anyone else can Think again about marriage.
Speaker 1:I've known many couples who've had a good enough relationship for years and have gotten along well enough, and then in middle age they've awakened to thinking that they might make their lives happier with one another, wherever it comes from. He wakes up one day and knows that his relationship with her is the most important thing he has and he begins to act like it. Or she understands that they only have the time allotted to them in life and it won't be forever, so she begins to look at him differently. When they look up and they look around, they begin to step out of the ruts they've walked and they start to see a whole new territory. Their marriage starts to look different even from the inside, because it is different once they look and see. Our life with the promises of God can be like that, we can begin something.
Speaker 1:Finally, we should never be afraid to confess that we haven't done all that we could do. That's usually an excuse to keep from doing anything at all, and it's effective. After all, if we haven't done much and we're embarrassed to admit that we've done so little, we need only to confess that we're not going to do much in order to have an excuse for doing nothing at all. But that's like saying that when we're 30, that it's useless to learn to play the guitar, since we didn't start when we were 16. And it's true. You might not become Stevie Ray Vaughan, but you can still learn to play something on the instrument. You might even become something like Django Reinhardt. He's the guy who played with two fingers on his left hand missing. Yeah, we haven't done all we might have done, but we can still begin to do. Who knows? We might even be able to begin something new. We could call it the advent of something new. Remember the monk Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote a book called Beginning to Pray. He confessed in the book that he had been a monk for 30 years and all he had ever done was just begin All of his life. He was just beginning over and over.
Speaker 1:We might pay attention and note that, as Advent is, segment Faith in Verse, we have a poem today called the Medium is the Message. The medium is the message. They said not so long ago, warning we'd never notice. Tv'd become our alter ego, despairing over our blindness and summary inattention as we sat so passively receiving the approved conventions without due focus on the blindingly obvious and overt, as the many messages came to us, secret and covert. But it's different now.
Speaker 1:I believe. In these postmodern days the medium has become the massage we enjoy always. It pokes and prods us with rough pressure here and there, makes for passing twinges of pain and our few bruises and tears, but we enjoy it finally, no matter its ultimate content, even if we're sore and stretched as our muscles are pressed and bent Every chance we get we lie flat and allow others' hands to move our thinking toward their avenues as best they can and become the hosts where outrage and conviction easily lodge. That's how we know beyond all doubt the medium is the massage. That's the medium, is the message. I hope that in the weeks to come, especially as we begin this Advent season, you can join us again as we explore what it means truly to be Living Catholic.
Speaker 2:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.