Advent Penance
Fr. Gus Carter
12 /5 /04

The purple of Advent signals that this is a time of repentance. At the beginning of to day's Gospel we hear John the Baptist proclaim, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jesus also began his ministry by urging the crowd, "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. " "Repent" means to change some of the ways we live. When we hear these words in the gospel, we are to ask ourselves, "What needs changing in my life to deepen my commitment to the kingdom of God. ?" I suggest that a good penance for Advent is to deepen our self-knowledge with the intention of changing things in our lives that are in opposition to God.

Changing bad habits we know is not easy. Our human nature finds it hard to give up even habits that harm us. We humans are addicted to many things. For example, our anger and impatience are hard to overcome. Yet these often spoil life for ourselves and for others. Solutions are hard to find when we have difficulty admitting to ourselves the harm we are doing. When we admit our wrong doing, we still find psychological resistance to acting in another way. Changing is beyond our ability to do alone. Our desire for reform must be accompanied by prayer. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous say that a person has to enter upon the spiritual path of their program in order to maintain sobriety.

The darker deeds of human nature come from our desires to possess and dominate. The need to own and control particularly infects our love relationships. Much literature speaks of people destroying the one they love. Possessive love destroys. We humans have a vicious tendency to use other people to satisfy our own desires. If another will not play our game, we will take our ball and go home. Love for some individuals means wanting another person to exist for them. Possessiveness especially poisons marriage and child rearing. How much anger, hate, hurt comes because other people do not act as we want them to.

The freer love is, that is the less grasping, the deeper it becomes. We must remember how freely God loves us. We love the good qualities in others. Love involves admiring and nourishing the good in another. Because of the relationship, helping another to grow comes back to us in the goodness of the other person. Love means sharing the blessings which each person is. When we seek to force or control others, we warp them because we want them to be for us rather than for themselves.

Love means being willing to negotiate. Together friends and spouses try to figure out how they can derive maximum benefit for their relationships. Our problem is that we do not wish to see or that we are blind to the needs of others. We pray for the insight to be sensitive to the needs of each other. Mutuality, taking care of the essential needs of each person, is necessary in a healthy relationship.

Another type of letting go involves positions and possessions. Certain positions, jobs, offices, status, appeal to our pride and our sense of value. People get nasty and unjust when their status is threatened. An expression I like says that we should have a "light grasp of life." We pray that the grace of Christ will keep us from grasping at positions in a way thai( produces rivalry, strife and dissension. The Lord can be served in so many ways. We must pray for a peaceful holding of our offices or status.

Clinging to possessions and dreaming of having possessions have caused many to miss the joys of ordinary life. It is a pity how many persons work constantly for possessions, who define themselves by what they have. They find that they have no depth of relationships, no appreciation for life, no valuing of nature. The scramble to possess results in so much injustice, cheating, abuse of power. We pray that we do not become possessed by our possessions.

The Buddhists have a saying:
“If all the harms Fears and sufferings in the world Arise from self-grasping, What need have I for such a great evil spirit. “

We know how commercial business has made much of Christmas. In preparation for the great feast we might reflect on what has grasping done in our lives. We pray for a perspective that all worthwhile things will be kept in balance in our lives. We have been given a glorious kind of life by the coming of Jesus. Are we taking advantage of all the Lord has done for us.