by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM, December 18, 2016
Is it strange that one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of the Advent season is space? Driving to and from New York City, which I do fairly often, I pay close attention to the electronic highway signs warning of accidents, detours, and traffic delays. I pay particular notice when the word, “heavy,” prefaces any report of what’s ahead and warns me of exactly how I’m going to be spending the next several hours of my life. At this time of year, however, the electronic message is pretty much the same every day: “Gridlock Alert. Take Mass Transit.” Translation: Too much going on. Too many cars. Too little space. Not enough room.
I read that as an Advent announcement, a contemporary signs-of-the-times sort of message. Make room. Let go of what’s no longer life-giving, but don’t stop there. Stretch your heart. Expand your worldview. Take a close look at what you’ve made room for and what you’ve kept out. 
“Enlarge the space of your tent!” Isaiah urges us. “Spread your tent cloths unsparingly. Lengthen your ropes and make firm your stakes.” The Message Bible provides a contemporary translation of Isaiah’s message as, “Clear lots of ground for your tents! Make your tents large. Spread out! Think big! You’re going to need lots of elbow room for your growing family…You’re going to resettle abandoned cities.”
Isaiah’s message is echoed as we prepare to enter into the Nativity story, holding up for our reflection a young couple desperately seeking space, safe space, space that will welcome not only them but the fragile, newborn life Mary carries within her.
Isaiah’s message is echoed today in the news accounts of desperate refugees seeking safe shelter. We see people in the besieged city of Aleppo, targeted and shelled and bombed into oblivion. From a world away, we hear heart-wrenching pleas for help. We see parents consumed with grief beyond words as they cradle the lifeless bodies of their children. We read their text and video messages as they ponder what may very well be their last words to our world. We may weep and wonder: is there no space that will welcome them, hold them to their heart, tell them they can sleep in peace tonight?
Isaiah’s message is also echoed in our everyday lives as we reflect on the choices we’ve made and are making about what to let go of and what to take in. About how we have made room for more engaged prayer, more thoughtful relationships, more experiences of beauty, more actions for justice. About how we have accepted the invitation for our worldviews to expand to fuller hospitality toward others who look different, or sound different, or share customs and traditions that are strange to us but cherished by them.
Isaiah’s message is echoed in an invitation recently offered by my IHM community to an
evening of contemplative dialogue promising a safe, sacred, non-judgmental space for people to gather following the U.S. elections. It was an experience of practicing Isaiah’s admonition to enlarge the space of our tent. In this space, we committed to make room for the other, to listen and share with openness and respect around 3 questions:
- Where is your heart now? (A question of feeling)
- What has your heart heard? (A question of noticing after a round of sharing and listening)
- How does your heart hope to move forward? (A question of desiring and acting after a second round of sharing and listening)
We are drawing close to the feast of Christmas. We are nearing the ultimate example of the Holy making space: Emmanuel, God-with-us, fully inhabiting and embracing our human condition with all its hopes and its brokenness. May our desire and our choices to make room be a sign of hope for our beautiful, yet wounded world.
Takeaway
Spend some quiet time in these last days of Advent, gazing with love at our world and reflecting on these 3 questions:
Where is your heart now?
What has your heart heard?
How does your heart hope to move forward?
Wishing you every blessing of Emmanuel, the Holy One who always makes room, in this Christmas season and always!
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These Advent images stand in stark contrast to what many have expressed as their feelings going into this season. In conversations, in faith sharing, in companioning people in spiritual direction, I’ve heard a litany of the same anguished life questions over and over: How can this be? What does this mean for people we love and care for, for people who feel unwanted and unheard? How are we called to be? And especially, where is God? I can resonate with all of these questions. Perhaps you can as well.
dark prison where he’s languishing, John the Baptist asks one of the most poignant questions in all of Scripture: “Are you the One who is to come, or should we look for another?” We can imagine the fragile hope, maybe desperation, behind John’s questions. As if he were really asking, “Tell me, have I been wasting my time? My life? Am I pointing in the right direction? Give me a sign! Show me your face!”
blessing? Go figure. How, we might ask, is that possible? Perhaps in the sense that Henri Nouwen describes, “To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment.”
suffering exacts–the terrible anguish, the intense physical or emotional pain, the feelings of rejection or loss or bewilderment or failure that sometimes accompany our human condition. But when we live from a grateful heart, we acknowledge that, in spite of appearances in those moments, God is present to us, God accompanies us, God continues to pour out unconditional love for us, and that is cause for profound gratitude. In our darkest hour, notes R. Wayne Willis, we can still use our pain and our loss to bless someone else whose wounds are fresher than ours.
past, even over actions taken in good faith and after careful discernment. This is true especially when the words spoken or the choices made did not result in a positive outcome. There are often expressions of “I should have…” or “If I knew then what I know now.” There is sometimes self-loathing or guilt or hidden shame. So how, then, are we to be when, like Vaughn Allex, our best efforts seem linked to a negative result?
So what might we learn about falling well that we can transfer and apply to the life of the spirit? Perhaps, flawed and limited as we are, it’s accepting the inevitability of falling and losing our balance. And then, with God’s grace, getting up and working and praying our way back to a place of being centered.
year-old husband and father of two small children, was diagnosed with ALS and given, at best, a few years to live. He chose to learn to live richly in the face of loss, the work that he called “learning to fall.” He wrote of falling as a figure of speech: we fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. We fall away from ego and our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our ambition. And we fall into compassion, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others who are likewise falling. “We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred,” he wrote, “into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.”
we reach adulthood, we will be 70% water. And if we live to old age, we will still be at least 50% water. He concluded that throughout our lives, we exist mostly as water. Naturally curious, he began to conduct a series of scientific experiments with water.
words on both water and human consciousness. Water, he believes, teaches us in a very clear way how we must live our lives. It helps us to see ourselves and our universe differently. “The vibration of good words has a positive effect on our world,” Dr. Emoto noted, “whereas the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy.” One has only to enter a room full of strangers in conversation to notice that some people are vibrating in ways that feel joyful or content, whereas others may move through the room carrying and vibrating messages of sadness or anger.
the “Pesame,” the one who stands as a witness to injustice. “Pesame” is used when there is pain that cannot be assuaged. Pesame, I’m sorry for your pain. It’s grieving with the other. It’s standing with the other. It’s used to describe Mary, the widow, the mother of the condemned, the brokenhearted one at the foot of the cross, the one who stands and watches and never ever abandons.
And like Mary, we also say yes. We say yes to remaining, to staying on while others abandon and give up. We say yes to being transformed by the learnings that come to us through the collective ache of our world. We say yes to remaining in the messy, confusing, painful places where something new is struggling to bubble up and break through. We say yes to sharing the fate of God for the life of the world. We say yes to embracing with acceptance the powerlessness we feel in the face of pain, violence, or loss, and meeting it with inner hospitality. We say yes to carrying and loving what God carries and loves.
An examen-type reflection can take place at any time. You might pause midday to discern how the day is unfolding. You might enter into it in the evening, taking a sacred break as night approaches. It’s an invitation to become aware of how God has been present. To savor one or more moments of the day, and give thanks. To notice when you loved and when you were loved. To express sorrow to God for anything you regret and to ask for forgiveness. To look forward to a new day and to ask for God’s grace as you begin anew.
precious lives commemorated through photographs, audio recordings, mementos. Outside at the reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, we searched for familiar names and let our fingers linger when we found them.