December 10, 2017
Every year tens of thousands of people from Sub-Saharan Africa cross the desert on their way to Europe. Some drown in the Mediterranean, some die on the way through the desert because there are hardly any roads. You need a local guide to direct you or you risk getting lost. Knowing this helps us to appreciate today’s invitation of Isaiah and of John the Baptist to build, not just a road, but a highway in the desert. It is built for fast travelling. No valley, no hills, like the just opened rail line to Munich for trains travelling at 300 km/h. Today we don’t fill valleys or level mountains, we build bridges and tunnels. But the idea is the same: that people and goods reach other places as fast as possible. But the highway through the desert is not for trains or cars, it is FOR THE LORD, FOR GOD. We are very good at creating communication systems to connect people and towns and continents. We are less good at creating channels of communication each other or with God. In fact, our lines of spiritual communication lines are poor. Advent invites us to reflect on how we can improve them so that we can reach God and God can reach us. There are many ways of communicating between God and us. Let us look at two of them. When we want to tell someone far away something important or very personal we tend to write a letter. Well, God has written us many letters, mostly love letters. There is a whole collection of God’s love letters to different people over thousands of years put together in a book called the Bible. We do not read love letters only once. We go back to them many times to taste the joy of someone telling us over and over again: I love you, you are so precious to me. One way of rebuilding our communication highway with God would be to read some of His letters as if they were written to me personally today. There is another way to communicate we use very often these days. We use Twitter, send an SMS or a WhatsApp message when we have something urgent and brief to communicate like: My train is late. Let’s meet tonight. The film was wonderful. God also uses a kind of messenger service, short quick messages that flash through the brain for a moment. I walk along a busy street and something in me says: Look at that poor woman over there. Give her a smile and a coin. I had a quarrel with someone and I hurt the person. Later I get a strong inner urge saying: Why not go and say sorry. Those messages of God come and go in a flash. Growing spiritually means learning to pick them up and react immediately. Why do we have such a hard time reading God’s love letters or responding to God’s quick messages? Because there are traffic jams on our mental highway most of the time. Our communication lines are overloaded with an unless flow of useless information. God always gets the feedback: line is occupied. What do you do when you receive hundreds of emails daily? You switch on a spam filter which deletes the useless and keeps only important mails. Advent would be a great time to clear up our mental mess and give God a chance to get through to us.
Fr Wolfgang Schonecke