Thirty-Second Sunday, 1996 (#1)

Holy Impatience

Four weeks from today we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of church year, the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and so today and for the next two Sundays we're sort of winding-down the liturgic____n years from now the sun's going to go out, but who's going to worry about that?--Life goes on. We're all absolutely routinized in our expectations of the way life goes on, and what life can offer, and what is possible. How does one break that? How does one break the power of habit of one's being, of diminished expectation?

Well, the only way we can do it here is precisely, to take seriously this parable from Matthew which says that no, the way things are is not definitive, much less determinative of the way things are supposed to be... Rather, we are to engender somehow in ourselves a sense of what Mark Hoover's called a "Holy Insecurity," "Holy Impatience" with the way things are--that God will have the last word... And, concretely, I think, at least for me, one of the things this does is to radically relativise everything I do..., everything I do.

Here at the college, we've been doing MBO stuff for years, I don't know whether it's still fashionable or not, Management Bi-Objectives, five year plans, ten year plans. And, by God, we get there, then it's finished. This is absolutely standard for us so that we can give some absolute validity to every thing we organise, and all our plans, and all of our expectation about what is do-able. To believe that God really will have the last word is to say that no, none of this is final... And, concretely, how does that play out? I don't know, I don't do it very well. But I know that if I do see to believe, or hope that God will have the last word, that this world in which I live will in fact be transformed into a family, that the 5.7 billion of us going about with sublime indifference to each other is not the final style of things, it will open us to the possibility of taking on the world. What do I mean by that? It seems to me the only way I can survive is to continually truncate the dimensions of the world--it's too much, it's to much to take in, to talk about compassion, fatigue, for example, because the misery is endless. The world is quibbling about the lives of maybe a million Africans right at this moment. Everybody has this little turf to defend. And, if you look at every other section, the political life in this province right now, everything we try to make manageable., which means we set goals and can achieve them. What the belief , in the end, says that all of that is radically relativised..., all that is radically relativised. And I don't have to blinker my life excluding great ranges of human reality because it is intractable. The Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, the North-South Irish conflict... is intractable. My God, the thirty wars currently raging on the planet--it's all intractable, that's true.

And so, the tendency to truncate this and make my world manageable so that I can survive is absolutely understandable. But that's exactly where these texts and this article of faith, "I believe in the world to come," becomes most urgent, and most poignant, and most powerful, if we allow it. But no, I can afford to live in this world, even if I have to do it very gradually, bit by bit, because ultimately it is not manageable by me or by anybody else. But God will have the last word... God will have the last word. That the Kingdom of Heaven, that the wonderful metaphor of this wedding feast, of this grand cosmic party, is to be real. And that will engender in us, I think, a kind of discontent that is not paralysing, and perhaps break down that psychological necessity that I have to be able to manage my life or my affairs, no matter how tiny I have to make those affairs to give myself the illusion of manageability.

"The End..." Stay awake. Awake for what? Awake for the next government, awake for the election in the States? No, no... Awake for God.

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