No change, little hope

Kissing the – ah – ring of the pro-abortionists who worked so hard to elect him, one of Barack Obama's first actions as President was against unborn children. As a largely symbolic action, within hours of his inauguration his staff had stripped from the White House website the document published by President Bush proclaiming January 18th National Sanctity of Human Life Day. In a practical action with direct and deadly consequences for the unborn, Obama is expected to sign orders reversing the Mexico City Policy which forbid Federal funds from going to organizations that promote or provide abortions overseas. This policy was first promulgated by President Reagan, sustained by Bush 41, reversed by Clinton, then reinstated by Bush 43. Now it will be reversed again by Obama, and American taxpayer dollars will once again support the spread of abortions around the world.

There is a symbolic aspect to this, as well: Obama plans to sign the order on Thursday, January 22nd – the 36th anniversary of the publication of the infamous Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions which struck down all state-level protections for unborn children across America. While thousands of pro-life marchers clog the Mall for the annual March for Life, he will be signing his order putting the authority and resources of America behind the spread of the Culture of Death.

If this seems like a small thing, consider this: with increased federal funding, pro-abortion organizations will be able to hire counselors and clinic staffers, who will advise poor women in other countries that abortion is their best option. They will be able to hire lobbyists and policy advisors to guide lawmakers and bureaucrats on best ways to liberalize abortion laws. As they have here in America, they will work to undermine the authority of families, churches, and other protections for women. The resources of the country that is supposed to stand for liberty and justice will be used to further the cause of oppression and violence against the weakest in the world.

Those Christians who voted for Obama – especially Catholics – should take careful note. Those of us who listened beyond the “hope” and “change” mantras knew full well that Obama would do this – he promised his pro-abortion supporters several times that he would. If you voted for him despite this public promise, if you were so dazzled by the fawning media adulation and the glitzy aura built around him, I'd love to know how you think you're going to answer before the Throne of Christ for helping put this man in the Oval Office.

Because you will have to.

A look back at strategic thinking

I'm not much into lifting blog posts from other sources, but in this case I couldn't resist. The Joint Operating Environment 2008 report is published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a high-level evaluation of global trends, and contains very high-level thinking about factors and scenarios facing the world. One thing they stress is that too much focus on "predicting the future" is unwise, since nobody can do so, and the important thing is to be flexible and agile in your thinking so as to be able to adapt to the inevitable unexpected.

As an object lesson in this principle, they had a sidebar in the report noting how strategic thinking looked at approximately 10-year intervals through the 20th century. It's instructive to note not only what changed, but how swiftly. This is a helpful exercise in a time when the media has everyone thinking that everybody has always thought the way we think, and will always think that way.

Strategic Estimates in the Twentieth Century:

1900 - If you had been a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you would have been British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy: France.

1910 - You would now be allied with France, and the enemy would now be Germany

1920 - Britain and its allies had won World War I, but now the British found themselves engaged in a naval race with its former allies the United States and Japan.

1930 - For the British, naval limitation treaties were in place, the Great Depression had started and defense planning for the next five years assumed a “ten year” rule -- no war in ten years. British planners posited the main threats to the Empire as the Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy were either friendly or no threat.

1936 - A British planner would now posit three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a resurgent Germany, while little help could be expected from the United States.

1940 - The collapse of France in June left Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with Germany and Italy with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. America had only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.

1950 - The United States was now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age had dawned, and a “police action” began in June in Korea that was to kill over 36,500 Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire brought an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict would be China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.

1960 - Politicians in the United States were focusing on a missile gap that did not exist; massive retaliation would soon give way to flexible response, while a small insurgency in South Vietnam hardly drew American attention.

1970 - The United States was beginning to withdraw from Vietnam, its military forces in shambles. The Soviet Union had just crushed incipient rebellion in the Warsaw Pact. Détente between the Soviets and Americans had begun, while the Chinese were waiting in the wing to create an informal alliance with the United States.

1980 - The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, while a theocratic revolution in Iran had overthrown the Shah’s regime. “Desert One” -- an attempt to free American hostages in Iran -- ended in a humiliating failure, another indication of what pundits were calling “the hollow force.” America was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen.

1990 - The Soviet Union collapses. The supposedly hollow force shreds the vaunted Iraqi Army in less than 100 hours. The United States had become the world’s greatest debtor nation. No one outside of the Department of Defense has heard of the internet.

2000 - Warsaw is the capital of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nation. Terrorism is emerging as America’s greatest threat. Biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, HD energy, etc. are advancing so fast they are beyond forecasting

2010 - Take the above and plan accordingly! What will be the disruptions of the next 25 years?

Slavethink in action

We recently rented The Lilies of the Field, which I hadn't seen since my youth. If you have never watched this 1963 classic starring Sidney Portier, you should, and if it's been a while since you've seen it, find it and watch it again. It's a beautiful, simple story with surprising depth to the characters and forthright expression of faith of the type that could not be found in a modern movie.

Though it's easy to focus on Portier's character, Homer Smith, I found myself paying more attention to the character of the Head Mother of the small convent, Mother Maria. Portrayed as a stiff and imperious dictator, Mother Maria is a severe contrast to the easygoing, down-to-earth Homer - something that causes much of the tension of the story. Their relationship of misunderstanding begins when she's convinced that God has sent her convent a good, strong workman while he's thinking of a pickup day job to earn some spare cash. Things go downhill from there, but somehow the essential goodness of everyone involved comes out and the chapel gets built.

The big question for most people watching the film is, why is Mother Maria so prickly? She's bossy, ungrateful, insensitive, and terribly demanding on those around her. She takes everything for granted, including Homer's generous help, which he is under no obligation to provide. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that she has alienated everyone else who has tried to help the convent, and she does the same to Homer a couple of times.

When I saw the film in my youth, Mother Maria's rudeness was simply a mystery to me. Why was she, a nun, supposedly a minister of God's grace and love to the world, so mean to Homer and everyone else? I think I have the answer.

Mother Maria saw herself as a slave. God's slave, of course, but a slave nonetheless. She saw her only value to God as being what she did for Him. She did not see herself as a daughter belonging to a family, but rather as a worker whose only value was her function, her productivity. This comes through clearly toward the end of the movie when she brings to the chapel the itinerant priest who serves her region. He's speechless at what Homer and the local parishioners accomplished, and gazes around the humble chapel as if it were the Cathedral of Chartres, grateful that he doesn't have to say Mass out of the back of a pickup any more. But all Mother Maria can mutter is, “there is so much to do, so much to do...” She doesn't take time to appreciate what has been done, she just looks forward to the next task on her list.

She views everyone else through this perceptual lens as well. People are there to be put to work, and once Homer actually refers to her as a slave driver. She's very even-handed, of course – she doesn't treat anyone any better than she treats herself, but it's clear from the story that she treats herself brutally. Why should she show herself – or anyone else – courtesy, consideration, or compassion? She doesn't see herself getting any of that from anyone – especially God. For instance, she never thanks any human for anything. She'll thank God, but never another human, because she doesn't accept any thanks herself.

This story reconfirmed one of the most important lessons that God has taught me in my life – one that He's still teaching me: that He wants people who think like sons and daughters, not slaves. For me, the basis for this lesson is the elder son in the famous story of the Prodigal Son found in Luke 15. Reading the story, most people focus on the Younger Son, the Prodigal, who squanders his inheritance. But the Elder Son is also a critical player in the story, and his self-perception slips out in the furious monologue he unleashes on his father (v.29-30): "All these years I have slaved for you..."

I could (and probably will) unpack in much more detail all the things God has taught me over the years on this topic. It's the central theme of a story of that very name - I Have Slaved For You in my book, The Last Ugly Person. But to focus on Mother Maria as an example of the type, her stiff and prickly personality stems from her perception of herself as a creature valued solely for how much productivity she can pack into a workday. It also causes no end of conflict and misunderstanding with nearly every other character, especially poor Homer.

My biggest emotional memory of Lilies of the Field from my youth is how sad I felt to see Homer's wagon driving away down the road as the closing credits rolled. He'd done so much there, he was so beloved by the sisters and the community! He had an offer of a good job and nowhere better to go - why couldn't he stay? Sadly, the answer is Mother Maria. In the final scene of the film, it slowly becomes clear to him that no matter how fond he is of the little community, and how much he wants a home, he'll never get past the Mother's demanding and thankless personality. That same reality seems to be dawning on Mother Maria as well, as he starts the sisters singing the film's trademark "Amen!" spiritual while he backs out of the room and packs his station wagon. She's sitting at the table, slowly coming to the realization that her brusque ingratitude has driven this man from their lives. The saddest thing is that it didn't need to happen. Had Mother Maria been able to see herself as a beloved daughter in the household of God, she would have been able to view and treat others the same way. Instead, she viewed herself as a slave, an appliance with a pulse, only valued so long as it performed its function. Why should she view those around her any differently?

Am I any different? Do I understand how my self-perception affects my view and treatment of others? Do I see that I can love only to the degree that I understand that I am loved?

Showing Forth the Light

“Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold darkness shall cover the earth, and a mist the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising.”

Isaiah 60:1-3

The Old Testament passage for Epiphany is drawn from Isaiah 60, where the Lord speaks of the future glory of Israel, and how light will shine on Jerusalem while darkness and mist (or fog) covers the nations (goyim). Further into the chapter it speaks of the wealth of nations being brought by foreign kings, even naming gold and frankincense, and how camels would bring this abundance of wealth (hence the camel theme so common with the Wise Men).

The darkness and mist was the darkness of sin, and the light was the revelation of the Incarnate Son of God, which was to illuminate not only the people of Israel, but to dispel the darkness that covered the nations. Listening to that reading this year, it struck me as it never had before: I am of those nations, those goyim who dwelt in darkness, far from the revelation of God. My ancestors had no claim to the promise, to the covenant of God. At the time of Christ, and certainly at the time of Isaiah, they probably didn't know there was such a nation as Israel. Yet God's mercy is so great that the Light made its way to the land of my forebearers, and they responded, and laid at the feet of the manger their treasures: a will submitted to God, which is more precious than gold or frankincense, and the only thing we can really give Him. Because my fathers were drawn out of the darkness of sin into the light of salvation, I can know eternal light.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like, living in that darkness. Dreary year after dreary year, no hope, no light, nothing but petty superstitions and legends, the dark maw of death ultimately swallowing all. Chesterton offers a glimpse, and studies can suggest some of it, but so long as I stand in the light, I'm only studying that from the outside.

What amazes me is how many people today want to turn their backs on the light and plunge back into the darkness. They think it's a better life, somehow. They forget how many stumbled about for centuries – millenia – in the darkness seeking the light. They don't think about the Wise Men, and why they took that long and arduous journey. What did the Wise Men expect to find, and why did they expect it to be any greater than what they had? They were magi, the wise – people came to them to get answers. Yet they undertook a dangerous journey to come before Wisdom Himself. Their spiritual forefathers, the Wise Men of all ages, had expended their lives in search of what the magi were given freely. No wonder they lay down their rich gifts – the Gift they got in return was of much greater value. Yet so many today want to turn their back on that Gift.

If anything, that makes me appreciate the Gift even more. I'm sorry that so many find the darkness enticing, and want to return there. My fathers waited long and worked hard and paid a high price to come to the light. I'm staying here.

New Year Profundity (or not)

Expectations are that the first post on the first day of a new year should be profound. Perhaps a thoughtful retrospective on the year gone by, or meditations regarding the days to come. When the date rolls around to "1/1", such things are de rigueur.

I'll try not to disappoint, but no guarantees.

Things are rather low-key around home today - we had our New Year's Eve party last night, and today the kids are mostly recovering by sleeping. The day began on a chilly note when I rose to find that the furnace had been switched off the night before (fortunately it just needed to be switched back on). After that I dealt with balky tub drains and balky routers (for some of my household, the router is the greater of those problems), and then got some pizza and watched a movie we rented. After I post this, I'm going to get around to some thank-you notes. A quiet day all in all.

But morning prayers provided an opportunity to do some thinking. Every year as I swap out my old ordo (i.e. schedule of readings) with the new one, I look at the thick bulk of pages covering the upcoming year and wonder what those days and months will bring. I've done this for years, and it seems like just yesterday that I was looking at the pages for 2008, wondering what experiences would accompany those readings. Now I can look back on them and attest: the experience of God's goodness and provision. I honestly don't know how we made it through this past year financially (as my tax return can witness), yet somehow here we are. Of course, it's been this way for 2½ years or so now - maybe I'm supposed to get accustomed to it. I'd like to be able to stop fretting and sweating over financial matters, but that's very hard, even when the Lord is giving extensive practical lessons in His provision. Maybe that'll be something I can focus on in 2009 - being less fidgety about how or when God is going to provide and simply trusting that He'll keep doing so, as He's proven He can do (however He does it). Not that I'd be casual about any work He put before me, or ungrateful to friends and family who have helped us out, but I'd work on trying to be a bit less frenzied about living so close to the edge. It seems to be where the Lord wants me living.

Of course, looking at the pages of 2009 made me wonder about the year to come. Many are gravely concerned about the upcoming year - financially, politically, socially, and in many other ways it looks like a very challenging time. As someone whose small business has been struggling for nearly three years, living in a state that never emerged from the last recession and whose major industries are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, it would seem that I have more cause for worry than most. As mentioned, I hope the lessons of the past years will help me be more trusting about God's provision - in fact, part of me wonders if these past years have been faith toning lessons, for my own sake and for the sake of others who I might encourage. But more than even this, I wondered what I'd like to accomplish in this upcoming year.

For me, the answer is simple: I'd like to reflect Christ better to those around me. I'll consider it progress if toward the end of the year, when others look at me, they can see Christ more clearly than they did at the beginning. My great example is St. John the Baptist - the man who knew that he was a herald, and that he didn't matter; that his message was everything. It was he who rejoiced to see Christ's coming, and trumpeted to his disciples, "He must become greater, and I must become less!" What total self-abandonment and unselfconsciousness! What abasement of pride and ego! What utter trust in his Master, that he didn't worry about his ministry or impact or résumé, but threw himself recklessly into his mission, leaving it to Jesus to sort out the final details. That's the attitude I'd like to have. Maybe I'll get more of it in the year to come.

My Wisest Words

I try to put some thought into things I say and write, especially when those things are for public consumption. I try to study where I should, think through what I want to say, and craft my words precisely.

But sometimes things happen that remind me what true wisdom is, and where it can be found. For instance, for the week around Christmas Day we stayed with my daughters' families, and had a grand time with the grandchildren. One of my grandsons is only five months old, so there's not much conversing we can do, but he likes me and I enjoy bouncing him and singing him nonsense syllables. This babbling serves no functional purpose except perhaps as a source of amusement to those watching, and is hardly dignified, but that doesn't matter. My grandson enjoys it, and while I'm doing it, he's all that matters.

Therein lies the wisdom that discursive reason cannot grasp. At his age, the little guy is that curious combination of totally self-centered and utterly unselfconscious. He has not yet learned to be sly, or to work things to his own advantage (those days will come soon enough). He simply exists out of his own center, living life as it happens. That outlook seems contagious, for when I'm playing with him, I find myself doing the same thing. I'm not thinking of his education, or character formation, or any other such weighty things (those days, too, will come soon enough, albeit secondarily for me). I'm simply being grandpa, and enjoying our time together. I'm not planning, or executing, or evaluating, or pondering - I'm just being, and relating out of that being. It's a skill that babies and a few others possess, and we adults tend to lose along the way.

This isn't to say that there isn't virtue in contemplation, or carefully deliberated action. But there's also a place for simply being, and enjoying who you are and who you're with. Hopefully we'll all take some time to do that during this holy season.

The Payoff

Temperamentally, I can look at life – particularly Christian discipleship – with a grim eye. I tend to relish themes like counting the cost, and not looking back once you've put your hand to the plow, and the sacrifices necessary to follow Christ. Highlighted in my Bible are verses pertaining to trials and difficulties and struggles. The past two posts on winnowing and smelting are typical of how I look at the Christian life and attendant struggles.

This outlook may be a helpful counterweight to a culture that focuses more on the comfort and benefits of the Gospel that the associated cost – when it pays attention to the Gospel at all. However, even useful counterweights can introduce imbalance if they are not kept in check.

That's why it's helpful for people like me to step back occasionally and remember that the struggle and trial and purification has a goal, and that goal is good. The winnowing ends, and you have good grain. The ore is finally smelted, and you have the pure metal. The trial brings the victory and the cost brings a payoff.

We are now into the Fourth Week of Advent. Four candles are burning in the wreath, and in days it will be Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, the celebration so festive that the Church taught a whole culture how to celebrate it. Every year the Feast comes around as a reminder that yes, we do have a Redeemer. The road to redemption may be long and trying and difficult, but there is a road where there was none before, and that road has an end.

Perhaps symbolically, this Christmas Ellen and I are away from home, at our children's homes, where all of us far-scattered ones are regathered. During the final countdown days of Advent we will be together. There will be conversations and good coffee and books to read to little ones and plenty of rest and fun and feasting. We will celebrate each other, and our Redeemer, and when the joyous morning comes we will exchange gifts as an expression of our love and esteem for each other, in commemoration of the Great Gift Who was given as the ultimate expression of love. Some days later, we will separate again (though we are never far out of touch), for we are still in this life.

But the day will come soon (very soon, in the grand timescale of things) when we won't have to separate any more. The Advent that is this life will come to an end. The purple will be put away, for the penance will be finished, and the white will come out forever. The True Feast will begin, and the full meaning of all the best Christmas mornings and weddings and reunions and family feasts will be realized. We will then taste the fullness of what all those joyous occasions only gave us the scent of.

So enjoy this Christmas, even in the midst of whatever trials you are enduring. May God bless you as you celebrate the Incarnation, the coming of hope beyond hope, and the opening of the road that had been utterly closed to us.

Refining by fire

Smelting is another Scriptural image for purification. This is the process by which metal is extracted from ore. Most of us moderns have learned of it from diagrams or pictures of industrial processes performed in modern factories far removed from where we live. But to people of Biblical times, smelting was much more immediate and familiar. Large quantities of crushed ore were piled into ovens and heated with a charcoal fire while air was pumped in. The result was a lot of useless slag and a very small amount of more concentrated metal-bearing residue. Once you got enough residue, you did the whole process again to separate out more slag (or “dross"), and then typically again and again until you finally had something like workable metal (hence the reference in Psalm 12:6 to “silver...refined seven times").

Every aspect of smelting was dirty, hot, backbreaking work. From making the charcoal to mining and crushing the ore to working the bellows to digging out the furnace, there was nothing glamorous about it. Smelting was a lot of work for very little return, but it was the only way to get metal, which was necessary for survival. It also provided an immediate object lesson in spiritual growth and maturity.

Granite is good, solid rock. You can hew it, form it, polish it, even engrave it, and it will hold up. Likewise iron is good metal, suitable for forging and hammering. But ore is neither good rock nor good metal. It is too crumbly and weak to serve as building material, too brittle to be hammered and formed, and even too soft to be used as an abrasive. If it isn't refined, it's useless.

This refining process illustrates two things. One is similar to the lesson of grain and chaff: what looks like a lot is in fact very little of value. A large pile of even high quality iron ore might yield a pound of iron; a large pile of a more precious metal such as copper or silver might only yield an ounce or so – and that only after lots of hard labor.

Another lesson is one that is directly used in Scripture several times: that the trials and struggles of this life are like the fire of the smelting furnace, used by God to separate out the precious spiritual maturity from the slag of the natural life. Thus when God in Deuteronomy 4:20 referred to Egypt as “the iron furnace" out of which He had drawn His people, nobody missed the point. This was not only true personally, as individual Israelites could see how the struggles they'd endured had increased their dependence upon God, but also corporately. According to rabbinic legend, only about 20% of the children of Israel chose to make the Exodus – the remainder stayed behind in Egypt, and their identity and memory is lost to history.

God used this smelting image again and again throughout Scripture. “The wicked" were compared to slag in Psalm 119:119, in Isaiah 1:22-25 Isaiah states that the pure “silver" of obedience has become slag that needs to be purified by trial. God explains to Ezekiel in Ezekiel 22:18 that the nation of Israel has become like slag. God uses the image of refining in Daniel 11:35 to explain how "the wise" will be purified through difficulty, and in Zechariah 13:9 God uses the same image to explain how He will deal with all His people. One of the final prophecies in the Old Testament, Malachi 3:2-3 compares the Messiah to "a refiner's fire".

Which is an interesting thing to keep in mind during Advent. Excitement and anticipation builds as we prepare to celebrate the coming of the Messiah. A few of us even hope for the Second Coming. But then, the Jews were excited about the Messiah's coming, despite the stern warning of Malachi (read Chapter 3 again) and the nearly brutal words of John the Baptist in his day. The Jews (and we) hope for goodies and good times; what they (and we) are promised is smelting. Sure, the result is good, but it's very hard on the ore, and a lot of useless bulk gets thrown out along the way.

From this perspective, Advent looks less like a countdown to fun and more like a challenge to our courage and character. Do we have the cojones to stand up and ask for "the treatment", knowing that smelting is not only painful to endure, but embarassingly revealing? How will we feel when the furnace cools and we learn that what we thought was a lot going in was mostly useless slag? ("That little hunk at the bottom is it? The rest of this is just junk?") Yet that trial by fire is the only way we become what we're meant to be. Without it, we're nothing more than debris on a hillside.

The Chaff of Life

When it comes to purifying things, there are two images that occur repeatedly in Scripture. One is winnowing, and the other is smelting. For most of us in the modern urban West, these examples lack the potency they had for the original hearers, so we tend to just skim over them. But especially in a season like Advent, where purification is a central theme, it's beneficial to look a little closer at both processes, and how they're used in Scripture, to see what we can learn.

When grain is harvested, you get more than just the grain. You get the husks (or hulls), bits of straw, dust, and other debris in there as well. The general term for this is “chaff”, and it's all waste. In order for the grain to be useful, the chaff has to go. In Biblical times, this was usually done by tossing the harvest on a round flat area, known as a threshing floor, and worked over with a stone something like a big rolling pin, or a wooden framework known as a threshing sledge. This broke the grain free from the chaff. Then workers would take things that looked something like leaf rakes, called winnowing fans (or forks), and with them scoop up the contents of the threshing floor and throw it into the air. The grain, being heavier, would fall back down, while the lighter chaff would be blown away.

Winnowing has a couple of effects. First, it substantially reduces the volume of the grain. A bushel of unwinnowed grain might look pretty full, but much of it is fluff. Once it is winnowed, there is a lot less of it, but it is a lot denser, and all of it is valuable. Another thing winnowing does is thin out the impostors. When viewed from the proper angle, an empty hull can look just like a kernel of grain. Only when you pick it up and it crumples between your fingers do you realize that you didn't have what you thought you did.

In the Old Testament, God frequently used the image of winnowing to drive home what He would do with those who ignored His law. One of the significant prophecies John the Baptist made about Jesus pertained to winnowing (“His winnowing fork is in His hand, to clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.” Luke 3:17) The obedient and faithful were the grain, the hypocritical and superficial were the chaff. When the Pharisees heard that, you can be sure they thought of Jeremiah 15:6-9 – and trembled.

What does this do for us here in Advent? It seems to me that the important thing is to notice that chaff is not something harmful like poison ivy, but it is undesirable specifically because it is useless. Even though it is an expectable part of growth (grains cannot grow without hulls), ultimately the chaff is simply discarded. It is natural, it is even useful in its time, but when harvest comes around (which was the purpose of all that tilling and planting and cutting), it is cast aside.

It's also important to note that the chaff is the visible part of the growing. Look out over a field ripe for harvest and you see golden stalks swaying in the breeze, their rich heads rustling as they rub together. Y'know what? All that you can see is waste – ultimately chaff. The valuable part, the kernels of grain, are hidden away and have to be extracted, separated from the hulls and straw. A particular stalk might look robust and impressive, but only after the externals are removed does anyone know how much grain the stalk actually grew.

So it is with our natural life and all the accouterments that go with it. The work schedules and menu plans and home maintenance and retirement accounts are natural and sometimes necessary parts of our lives, but they are concerns that belong to this world. Like the hull that shelters the grain, their purpose is to nurture the spiritual life that is what the Sower really wants from the field of our lives. And if that's true for the productive aspects of our earthly lives, how much more is it true for the movies and the video games and the other idle things with which we fill our time. Again, not that any of those things are innately bad, any more than hulls and straw are, but they're not the goal of our existence.

Perhaps Advent is a time to ask the Harvester to do a little winnowing in our lives. See what harmless but useless distractions He could call to our attention and help us remove. We may not yet be able to experience the ultimate winnowing in our lives, but it may help us to have some of the chaff removed, if only so we can see that our baskets maybe aren't as full as we thought they were – and that much of what they're full of isn't worth all that much.

We aren't ready

Advent is an interesting season. In the modern West it has been nearly eclipsed by the mercantile Christmas season (or “XMas”, as C.S. Lewis puts it in his classic essay.) Even for those who strive to observe Advent, such as our family, it can seem a season without depth. When I was growing up, Advent was sort of a “mini-Lent”, and we gave things up or made resolutions, but it never had the grim severity that accompanied the season approaching the Passion (for one thing, that steadily increasing sequence of lit candles was a promising countdown to the Big Day!) So the season tended to devolve into flat rituals, such as opening the doors of the Advent calendar and reading the specified verses. Even the Mass readings took on a predictable cant: “A voice cries out in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way of the Lord!'” “For unto us a Child is born...” The theme of sober preparation, of getting ourselves ready, gets lost in the merriment accompanying the approaching holiday, and lost along with it is the underlying statement implied in that theme.

Implied statement? What would that be?

That we're not ready.

Not ready? How can that be? Aren't we careful to follow all the Church instructions regarding Mass attendance? Do not many of us consecrate even common days to the Lord with Rosaries, or saying the Liturgy of the Hours, or Scripture study? Do we not pray and seek the Lord several times a day?

Perhaps we do. But the ancient cycle of the Church Year was drawn up by men who did those things as well, and in their wisdom they ordained that there should be such a Season, and its message should be: Prepare. It may profit us to examine their reasoning more closely.

In what ways might we be not prepared for Christ's coming? There's an interesting incident in Israel's history that gives a clue. It's in Joshua 24, in the same context as the famous “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” passage (v. 15). In verse 23, Joshua instructs the people to “put away the foreign gods” and to make good on the repeated promises they make to follow the Lord alone (v. 16-24)

But what are these “foreign gods”, and why would this generation of Israelites have any? The literal word is teraphim, and scholars agree that these were household idols – we might call them talismans or good luck charm charms – that people tucked into nooks and crannies of their homes (or tents, as the case may be.) These weren't big, public idols – the last time the Israelites tried that, it was with a golden calf at the foot of Sinai, and the results were catastrophic – but petty little tokens intended to bring luck, or watch over some portion of the hearth or home. In the Israelites' eyes, they weren't so much blatant idolatrous rebellion as minor fetishes.

God didn't see them as minor. He wanted to be the only God the Israelites had, and have His law rule every corner of their lives. But neither did He see these petty godlings as the kind of gross offense the Golden Calf had been. The Israelites brought them out, renounced them, and buried them under a tree.

But you can bet that these petty distractions crept back in over time – as similar things do in our lives. That's why times like Advent are helpful. Perhaps that can be a focus for us: asking God to help us see the petty trinkets and tokens we've let creep in. What are we looking to besides God? What things might He want to clean out? If we did hear a knock on the door of our lives and knew it was Jesus, would we rush to open it for Him? Or would we call out, “just a second!” and scurry about tucking away things we wouldn't want out in plain sight when He walked in? If so, what are those things, and what can we do about them now?