Now, is this just a lament for times long past and gone? I don’t think so, because one of the things that is present in the liturgical and natural year is that together they were supposed to amplify or echo the experience of faith, of believing. Speaking for myself, most of the time, faith is experienced as enormous darkness. For me, and a bunch of people, faith is a matter of real struggle, of hanging on, believing in spite of. And so, it is really useful to have some kind of place or event where you can say that there is an experiential dimension to this reality that we say we believe in. And all of this is brought to mind by the occurrence of Advent.

What is Advent about? Well, we will be hearing from the Prophets all during the four weeks of Advent. Isaiah is going to be the leading one. The Prophets and even this passage from Romans, and the passage from Matthew all have this much in common: they talk about emptiness. The whole prophetic experience was experience of emptiness: something is not here; swords are not beaten into ploughshares; swords are precisely used for their original intention. And so it is the genius of the Prophets, who looked to the world and said; "something is missing, there is an emptiness here". And of course, you read the lives of the saints and that is a constant, that we sort of cheapen when we easily talk about the "dark night of the souls". When the mail doesn’t arrive on time or my Master Card bill is miscalculated - then we have dark nights of the soul. That is not what John of the Cross was talking about. He was talking about an absolute sense of desolation. All you have to do is read him. And that is what Advent is for. Because we are so removed from all this I would like to take the four Sundays of Advent and talk about emptiness from a variety of perspectives.

Today, to start with: the fact that emptiness is an anomaly. We are not empty. Go to Eatons, go to Wal Mart, the place is full of people, of goods, of music. The parking lots are full. Everything is full. Our schedules are full. There is no emptiness at all in our lives. And so, just to start things off I would like to ask a question: where is there some real experience of emptiness? Maybe it would be also useful to ask; why are the parking lots full? Why are the department stores doing 33% of their business in this month before Christmas? Why this sense of plentitude, exuberance, dare I say it, excess? Nature abhors a vacuum. So whether it is a physical nature or a psychological nature, we can’t stand the thought of something not being there.

The essence of the emptiness of Advent, is that we are waiting. In Simone Weil’s wonderful phrase, We are "waiting for God". But we are not waiting for God. We are too busy. We have too much stuff going on. Waiting for God, I mean Advent, is a non-event. Two weeks ago as I said, we had a Christmas party. Some of my neighbours have had their Christmas lights up for three weeks. And well before the first Sunday of Advent, there were Christmas trees in the house. Why? All this activity is something to fill us up. It is a response to the threat of boredom. Is that it? I don’t know. But surely a central problem is that we have to be active and in control. So, if there is even a suggestion of a gap, of a sense of emptiness, I must rush in immediately and fill it with something. Like buying Christmas tree lights or decorating the shrubbery in front of the house. Or making sure that I have three hundred presents for everybody on my list.

If any of this is true, we may well ask: are we ready, are we even prepared to wait for God? To be empty? So that we can be filled, and not by our own nervousness at the thought of a vacuum, or a void that we have to fill it in by ourselves or by all our stuff, my stuff, stuff, stuffing. We are not empty. So, Advent – the first thing to do is to find out where we are already filled up. I think, - to do some excavation. Why this frenetic, passionate, intensity? Filling up with stuff, why that? From these we can begin to create apertures, cracks, crevices in this overfull life, in this overfull world, that we above all, in North America, live in.

A little tiny thing that strikes me that probably won’t resonate with too many people, I remember going into the grocery store in Lusaka Zambia, a long time ago. You would find this whole room full of shelves, with only two onions in the whole room. For us who have thirty-two kinds of Corn Flakes, it was really an uncanny experience. To go into that room and find nothing but two rather sad looking onions. And anyone, who has ever lived in the third world, knows that this is not an anomaly. So, I believe that there are all kinds of places where we could do some evacuation and because we are also insulated from nature, we do not have that kind of experience, we do not have that kind of resonance for what we say we believe. We live in a culture that radically wants to resist any sense of emptiness. Psychic emptiness – you can pull your own strings, you can be your own best friend, you can be in control, you can be in charge. That is what we are constantly being told. Emptiness? Who needs emptiness? And yet without emptiness, where is there room for God? It is very simple. Without emptiness, where is there room for God?