I was finally back at Holy Ghost for the First Sunday of Advent. It felt great. Fr. James Doran was the celebrant and the choir sang the Orbis Factor Mass.

Fr. Doran gave an awesome and inspired homily on Sunday about the silence of God. The silence of God is a recurring theme I’ve heard Fr. Doran speak about in prayer workshops and in the confessional before, but I had not yet heard him preach about it at Mass. The First Sunday of Advent was the perfect time. He took the reading from Isaiah as his starting point:

Return for the sake of your servants,the tribes of your heritage.Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,with the mountains quaking before you,while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,such as they had not heard of from of old.

Here the prophet is imploring the Lord to make some noise, to do something so that His people would listen to Him. The Prophet believes if only people heard more from the Lord that their behavior would improve, and they would be more faithful. The psalmist seems to agree; we all said with him on Sunday:

Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.

We all have the desire for more consolations from God, to see Him and hear Him more often and directly, and we believe, with the psalmist that if we could only see Him that we would be saved.

Yet despite our longing the Lord is silent, and He requires us to live by faith. Fr. Doran spoke of the profession of St. Therese of the Child Jesus, Doctor of the Church as a Carmelite. According to her own diaries, her espousal to Christ was an occasion of spiritual aridity. And this great Saint was ever more thankful for the silence of God on this occasion because in it He gave her the greater gift of proceeding by faith alone.

I wish I had that kind of Faith!

I really needed to hear this homily. Advent for me is often a time of spiritual difficulty. I’m not sure that before Sunday I would have called it dry, or silent, although those terms apply; instead I might have called it arduous or just plain difficult. Advent has always been a trial in our family. In the early years of our marriage finding ourselves broke and nearly destitute in Illinois, packed what belongings we could afford to ship into boxes, shipped them UPS and then took off in our barely functioning vehicle across the country retreating to the arms of family having no idea what the future would bring with our two children in tow and my wife pregnant. Advent seems to have repeated this early pattern in some form (although less severe) ever since. In this time of preparation (and it is impossible preparation—how do you prepare for the coming of perfection?) with too many things to do, and too many people to please, God, and His mercy seem to recede into the background of my experience. Often, it is during Advent that I find myself struggling to maintain hope, and wishing that God would come and rend the heavens and re-work the clay of my substance and do the preparation for me. I find it difficult at times to proceed by faith and not to loose hope. But of course Fr. Doran spoke on that theme Sunday as well. He told us hope is like a seed received at baptism, and that for it to grow, our hope must be tended and cultivated. We must cultivate our own hope. This, of course brings us to the Gospel on Sunday with Our Lord’s command to “Be watchful! Be Alert!”

It was good to be back at Holy Ghost.