The Great Bending Down

We enter a new liturgical year and the great season of Advent. It is a twilight time, a time of fertile darkness, a time of waiting, of looking for something. Culturally we find ourselves in a kind of mist. We strain to make sense of what is going on. So what are we waiting for in 2020?

We want peace…we want order…we want truthfulness and honesty. We want to be saved…from ourselves. Advent is a time of hope, a time that tells us that what we want is already on the way. It’s message centers on the birth of a baby, not an army, not a new foreign policy, but a baby.

The Mystery that is saving us bends down, wrapping itself in our DNA. Infinity binds itself in littleness. We ponder this, amazed. We know what’s coming. There will be the growing up, the ordinary eating, sleeping, being in the family. There will be living the limits of being able to do only so much. Then there will be the bending into rejection, arrest, conviction, and execution. And because such love can’t die, it takes one more step down. It finds a way to stay with us in the struggle, it becomes our food, strength for the journey, our bread.

What is this bending down of our God? Are we fools, to preach a God who wants to be eaten?

Or is this the epitome of wisdom, to present a God who is bent on making us divine? So we enter into the Great Bending Down. We slowly become what we eat. And the Baby laughs.

Little mite, who charms us,

You lure us to bend our stiff necks and rigid backs

To capture us in a perennial kiss!

Tear-filled Hope

To speak of hope to those who are desperate, it is essential to share their desperation. To dry the tears from the faces of those who are suffering, it is necessary to join our tears with theirs.
                                                                                                                                        --- Pope Francis


We’ve been reflecting on hope as we live these days in between what we have been and what we are becoming. As we enter the fertile darkness of Advent, it is a good time to risk entering the space of those who grieve, of those who seek answers and find none.


Sometimes we grieve and we don’t want to be consoled. Sometimes there is no way of alleviating a wound that cannot and does not want to be healed. It is a pain proportionate to love. Every mother who loses a child knows this pain. To dry the tears of those who suffer in this way we need first to join them in their desperation. Only when we have joined our tears with theirs might our words be capable of giving a little hope. If we cannot do this, speak words with tears, it is better to be still. A hug, a gesture, but no words.


I will never forget the experience of this when my mother died. I was living with a group of four Dominican women from Sparkill, New York. My mother in Milwaukee had suffered an abdominal aneurysm and died in the emergency room. When I got the call, I couldn’t speak. I just sat down in a living room chair. The four sisters came in and just sat down around me. They didn’t say anything. They just sat with me. It was the most precious gift they could have given me. They were just there for me in my grief. They entered into it with me. They didn’t try to push it away. They just sat.

These tears, flowing from love, generate hope. Although not easy to understand, this is true. Often in life, tears sow hope. Tears are the seeds of hope because hope comes from longing and the heart aches for what it longs for but not yet have. The tears of suffering born of love produce hope, and we would not have it any other way.

I am, God says, the Master of Three Virtues.

Faith is a soldier, a captain who defends a fortress.

Charity is a doctor, a Little Sister of the poor,

Who nurses the sick, who nurses the wounded,

But it is my little hope

Who says good-day to the poor man and the orphan.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.

                                                                                                                 --- Charles Peguy 

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness.

                                                                                                                   --- Desmond Tutu