The Advent Call to Leave the Spiritual Marketplace, Second Friday of Advent, December 14, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of St. John of the Cross
December 14, 2018
Is 48, Ps 1, Mt 11:16-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we have been pondering, Advent involves a triple dynamism: the Lord comes, we go out to meet him with lighted lamps, and then transformed by the encounter with the Bridegroom we continue to journey with him and finish together with him his mission.
• When we go out to meet him, it’s key that we allow him to transform us. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that many of us don’t encounter him with that in mind. He describes his generation — and frankly every generation — like children in marketplaces “sitting,” in other words, not wanting to move. They’re playing different music and want everyone to respond to that music: if they play the flute, they want people to dance; if they play a dirge, they want people to mourn. The key is that they want to set the terms of the interaction. They want the others to move. That’s what Jesus was saying they were doing with God’s messenger and God himself. They criticized John the Baptist for his ascetically fasting; and when Jesus wasn’t fasting because he was showing us how to rejoice because the Bridegroom was with us, they criticized him for drawing close in mercy to the hedonists like the tax collectors and other sinners, who were enjoying the things of this world in a disordered way. They failed to grasp that it’s we who should be dancing to the Lord’s music and not the other way around.
• I also think it’s significant that Jesus describes them as sitting in the “marketplace.” The marketplace is where we go to buy things according to our preferences. Today this is an issue because in the marketplace we learn a type of “consumerism” that can then come to impact our faith. We like things to happen according to our pleasures and preferences: we like certain Mass times and not others, certain music or none, certain popes, bishops or priests, certain Psalm tones, certain lengths of homily, certain messages, certain styles. We can go on. This consumerism can cause us to behave much like the children in the marketplace, trying to play the music for our relationship with the Lord. We play soft, sentimental hits and want the Lord just to touch our emotions. Or we’ll play marches and want the Lord to ship others around us into shape and boss them around like a drill sergeant. Or we’ll play horror movie music to try to “scare the hell” out of people. Or we’ll play heavy metal and drown out the Lord’s whisper. Or we won’t play any music at all, because we’re in a bad mood, or hate music, or can’t sing, or anything else. The point is that we need to attune ourselves to what the Lord is playing.
• In the first reading, God tells us through Isaiah, “I, the Lord, your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” We need to allow him to teach and guide us, rather than our seeking to teach him how the world, our life and the lives of those around us should run. We need to follow him rather than, like Peter when Jesus called him “Satan,” try to lead him. We need to learn in all of these ways to sing with him a new song. In this kairos of mercy, we should be singing, “Misericordias tuas in aeternum cantabo!,” “I will sing of your mercies forever!” In this time where faith is needed, we should be chanting “Let it be done to me according to your word” and “Faith of our Fathers.” In this time in which there’s such a need for the joy of the Gospel, we should be singing the “Magnificat.” But as we sing them, we’re supposed to be singing them in a new way, with all we have.
• The Psalmist describes the type of fruit we’ll produce when we align ourselves to the Lord’s music, when we delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night: we will be like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. When we listen to what the Lord teaches us for our own good and allow him to lead us on the way we should go, hearkening to his commandments, as Isaiah tells us, we will spiritually prosper like a river. But if we don’t, if we want to remain in control, the Psalmist tells us we will be like chaff, dead airy matter with no holy solidity, blown away by our whims.
• Someone who lived with his whole life attuned to God is St. John of the Cross. John’s father died when he was two and he, his mom and two brothers grew up in poverty. Eventually he began working in a hospital while taking simple classes and the hospital administrator paid for his education. He eventually became a Carmelite, but the worldliness and in some places sinfulness of the Carmelites led him to think that he might be called to be a Carthusian. That’s when he met with St. Teresa of Avila, the foundress of the Discalced Carmelites, who asked him to work with her to reform the whole order. He did. And he suffered for it. Many of the Carmelites did not want to be reformed — most wanted to play and dance to their music rather than God’s! — and they weren’t open to the fact that this reform was coming from God. On one occasion, the unreformed Carmelites essentially imprisoned him from months in a dirty, dank cell with just a sliver of light coming in. On a second occasion, they brutalized him as he prepared for death. But the religious name he had taken in the reformed Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, was well chosen: and it was through bearing that Cross that he discovered God’s power and wisdom, writing some of his greatest spiritual works — his four great poems on the interior life that led to his four great commentaries — during those sufferings. He was able to sing the dirge or play the Lord’s flute, whatever the Lord required. He persevered in faithful, hopeful, loving prayer despite terrible persecutions. None of them could shake him, for even in the midst of his sufferings, he never ceased to have trust in God. And the poems and commentaries he gave pointed out to the dynamism in faith. Rather than staying where he was, he wrote about ascending Mount Carmel together with the Lord, heading out into the Dark Night with the Living Flame of Love singing the Canticle of Love. He didn’t stop following the Lord even when those supposedly acting in his name were persecuting him. He wrote once, in a short series of aphorisms called The Degrees of Perfection, “Remember that everything that happens to you, whether prosperous or adverse, comes from God, so that you become neither puffed up in prosperity nor discouraged in adversity.” He saw that even his adverse tribulations came from God and maintained his courage to the end, where he died maltreated and abandoned by seemingly everyone but God. And in the process, John became Jesus the Master’s greatest teaching assistant in the school of prayer. Some of his pithy aphorisms in his Degrees of Perfection I’ve never forgotten from the time I first encountered them half a lifetime ago and they show us how to open ourselves to the downpour of God’s grace in every circumstance and how not to be scandalized in Jesus even when things around us aren’t going according to what we think ought to be the Messiah’s plan: “Remember always that you came here for no other reason that to be a saint; thus let nothing reign in your soul that does not lead you to sanctity.” “Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.” “Do not commit a sin for all there is in the world, or any deliberate venial sin, or any known perfection.” Those were the tunes that the Lord taught him and through him taught us.
• Today we ask the Lord to help us to learn to love the Canticle of Love that is prayer the way that John did, to leave behind our desire to sing at our speed, at our pitch, with our version of the lyrics, with the melody that might please us most, to singing his Song which is ever new. We ask him to help us, like St. John of the Cross, to synchronize ourselves to the Lord’s music so that as we go out to meet the Lord who is coming we can begin that dance with him that the Carmelite doctors of the Church tell us is meant to last into eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: