If we fail to see that life is so much more than how it can appear in everyday life, then we can miss its wonder and beauty. Author Michael McGirr reflects on how Advent and Christmas invite us to see the world as God sees it.
I have learnt a few things about prayer waiting for my children to finish work. I am glad of these lessons. I hope they keep coming. They are sometimes so simple that they are easy to miss.
The day my younger son got his first job he came out of the fast food outlet with a smile from ear to ear. I saw Jacob in the rear-view mirror and by the time he got into the car he had reassembled his usual reserve. I hadn’t seen him smile like that for a while and all my misgivings about the treatment of poor chookstook a backseat for the moment.
‘Yeah, I got it.’ There are cultures where teenagers spend time in monasteries. I wonder if the custom arose because they don’t say much anyway.
Thus began a long series of weekends when my son had the late shift on Friday and Sunday, sometimes finishing close to midnight. I would turn up early and wait in the carpark in case it was quiet and they let him go early. He worked hard, turning innocent chicken into somebody’s guilty pleasure. By the end of the shift, he would be covered in flour. He discovered the secret of how gravy is made in such places; it doesn’t bear repeating. Better to stick to the recipe in Paul Kelly’s famous song ‘How to make gravy’, a magnificent portrayal of the hopes and confusions of Christmas.
Our car is ten years old and, in all that time, I had seldom noticed it had a sun roof. But now, waiting in the carpark, I reclined in the seat, turned off the radio, and looked at the sky. Even if it was a cold night, I rugged up and simply gazed. Around me, the smells of fast food and the noise of traffic reminded me that life was cluttered and intense. The bins were overflowing with the packaging that helps us forget that chooks were ever living creatures.
Across the road is a late-night kebab stand, a place of local legend. Words of scripture appear in peeling paint on the awning: Come to me you who are burdened and I will give you rest. I am glad it was Christ who said these words and not the proprietor. Kebabs, in my experience, do not lead to rest, especially when doused in garlic sauce. Uber drivers gather around the stand. Their life is one of waiting. The day before, I got a ride from the airport with an Ethiopian driver who had waited five hours for a customer. Before that, he had waited years for a visa.
Yet above me, the stars, even dimmed by the ambient light, told a patient story. When it rained, I closed the roof and watched the patterns of water dancing before my eyes. I felt calm and expectant. The wonder of the universe reached past the obstacle course we have made of this world. I heard the same story when a caller on the radio said that whenever she put out the rubbish, she looked at the sky for a moment and found a kind of healing. The ageless stars put the weekly garbage in perspective.
The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, a small work that began its life 500 years ago this year, has shaped my faith in more ways than I could say. The second week of the exercises offers a meditation on the incarnation. This comes at a key moment. Any pilgrim (the word Ignatius used of himself) being guided through the exercises will have spent a good deal of time up until now answering a call to befriend themselves and their own faith story.
I never met anyone who experienced the first week without a few tears. They pray about their ingrained habits of decision making, their usual pattern of relationships, their compulsive behaviour, their exploitative relationship with the world, their closed hearts, their unanswered longings, their indifference to others. The week is set up as an experience of finding light in darkness, grace in gracelessness. For many, it is an Advent kind of journey.
Then a change. Ignatius asks us to focus elsewhere. To see the whole world, struggling under the weight of seven billion different egos, as the triune God sees it. Some people are black and some are white. Some are old and some are young. Some are happy and some are sad. Some are dying and others are being born. It takes imagination to see ourselves, all of us, from the point of view of one of those stars way out beyond the kebab stand and chicken place. Imagination is big in Ignatian Spirituality. It is usually at the service of making godly decisions.
Ignatius asks us now to see the room where Mary is waiting, although she may not know it, in what he calls ‘the city of Nazareth.’ It was probably a village but Ignatius was an urban pilgrim at the gateway of what we might call the modern age. He wants us to use the imagination of our senses: to smell the room, feel the air, hear the words, taste the apprehension, see both the visible and invisible. To be present in this moment. To almost physically share the yes at the heart of our faith memory.
Then to consider our own space. Our own rooms. Our own desks. Our own cars. Beyond the cramped space of steering wheels and hand brakes, beyond even the stars, God is waiting for our yes.
It was in the middle of such thoughts that I realised that the battery in the car was flat. I sent Jacob home in an Uber and waiting for the roadside assistance woman to come. It took time. She had come from Ukraine. She too had waited in a long line.
Christians think of the weeks before Christmas, known as Advent, as a time of waiting. They have long used stars to tell the story. A people in darkness see a great light. We need to see the darkness before we can see the light. We can find peace in a frumpy carpark, waiting for a new battery, when we also know there is so much more to the story.
Michael McGirr is the head of mission at Caritas Australia. His new book is Ideas to Save My Life (Text).