Borne Without Illusion

November 28

First Sunday In Advent

Psalm 25:1-10; Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-4:2; Luke 21:25-36

Faith has to do with time, with moral anticipation. We are the creatures who look forward, struggle with time's constraints and possibilities. We are the creatures who wonder: what next, and why, and what to do, and whither - again, our time-bound selves demonstrating moral inquiry.

The psalmist pleads for God's instruction. The prophet foresees days of righteous glory, a welcome change indeed from the iniquity he has noticed so scrupulously and condemned with all his might and considerable eloquence. The disciple recalls Jesus himself telling of the future - its promise, but its mystery, too; and the disciple links the future to the present, as do the Old Testament teachers, who know that to wait is to watch - oneself as well as the skies for their signs. Finally, the itinerant early convert yearns for that great, blessed day, a reunion with God, and as his predecessors did, connects that future with the continuing present of our collective lives: how shall we live if we are to meet God and his judgment?

A great privilege of my young life was a friendship with the old and ailing Dr. William Carlos Williams. In life, as he talked, as in many of his poems, Williams constantly mentioned the tension between art and conduct; a matter, he once put it, of time: "We say something pious, and we mean it, but in a moment we forget it, because we become the heartless cutthroats we also have it in ourselves to be."

I can still hear that message, from a man not especially religious, at least in the traditional sense of the word. I can still hear him reminding a listener that what really matters is not the beauty and cogency of a particular moment (a poem, for instance, a sermon, yet another book...) but the way we bear ourselves over the long haul of things.

Christianity is the story of simple people following in their naked blindness an itinerant rabbi, scorned and soon enough killed. Christianity offers rural homilies and peasant parables, and not especially elegant riddles. Christianity offers hope all right, but lots of fear and worry, and certainly no solace for the high and mighty. Christianity offers the birth of a child - God become man; the extended test of time which a given life, his life, offered people long ago.

A life's moral conduct also has to do with time, longer than the length of a university examination, longer than the length of a bar examination, longer than the length of a foundation-supported sabbatical, and yes, longer than the length of a church service, or for that matter, a season, even the Advent season. Let us pray we are not found wanting ethically down the road of the time allotted us. Faith is our declaration that we will try hard to remember God (always, not just now and then, not just in big moments or in big, showy ways) as we walk that road.

December 5

Second Sunday In Advent

Psalm 126; Isaiah 9:2, 6-7; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

As Dickens reminded us in Great Expectations, we are easily become victims of our aspirations, our energetic yearnings. His novel is, really, a chronicle of hope raised, only to be dashed. He was not sure how to end the novel, whether to let the sad lessons learned stand untouched, or to offer the reader a slim reed of solace: the chastened Pip and the equally chastened Estella find a way to start life again.

But the heart of the story is the cost of illusion, picturing how high a price we pay, if we allow ourselves to be tricked by ourselves and others. Pip and Estella are not only literal orphans; they are, figuratively, all of us, who may have benefactors of various kinds, yet be utterly lacking in that we are at loose ends morally. Estella is lovely, yet she does not know how to be good, decent, thoughtful. Pip is lucky, indeed, yet he is similarly wrapped in his own preoccupations, pretenses, vanities.

So with all of us, orphans on this planet, and soon enough to be struck down. Both Old and New Testaments constantly remind us that appearances count little, that irony and paradox abound: the seemingly fortunate end up in a shambles, the apparently luckless have a way of being teachers of us all, as Dickens lets the good blacksmith Joe Gargery be to Pip.

Dickens calls Joe, not without careful intention, "a gentle Christian man." Advent is, among other events, a notice to us: an expectation gets filled all right, when promised in Scripture, but in surprising ways indeed. Surprising to whom? Surprising to those who are rich and powerful and learned and, yes, vested with ecclesiastical authority; or so was the case 1,982 years ago.

Psalm 126 tells us that the unexpected can, all of a sudden, overwhelm us with joy. The great prophet Isaiah also tells us that a time will come when that joy will reign. Paul is, as always, convinced of the Lord's ultimate triumph on behalf of all those who deserve it; and Luke tells us what it was like when the foretold actually started happening.

Still, the prophets of Israel knew how blind and deaf we all can be; so did Paul. Nor was Luke a stranger to indifference, incredulity, even betrayal - among the most select of all history: those chosen by Jesus to be his disciples. No one, even they, can take for granted a given set of "great expectations." We are all in jeopardy. What is promised, even by God, is not necessarily ours. We must grow to eat our spiritual bread, even as those forlorn characters Pip and Estella found that money and power given meant nothing in the face of moral complacency or self-centered willfulness.

Robert Coles was a child psychiatrist and writer of more than 30 books, including the five-volume Children of Crisis, when this article appeared.