Fr. Russ's Homily - December 13, 2009

Homily for the Third Sunday in Advent.
There it is, right at the beginning of this gospel, that perennial human question, “What should we do? Very few of us escape that question sometime or another in our lives. Sometimes it concerns a relatively minor matter. “What dress should I wear?” “What can should I buy?” Other times it concerns more serious religious problems that weigh heavily on people today. “Why are so many young people leaving the church?” “What do I say to my children who say they no longer believe or go to church?” Sometimes it concerns crucial and life-changing issues of relationships and health. Whatever, we’re often in a dilemma. What should we do? Whom can we turn to? Who will understand? Where can I find an answer? Is there an answer?
We observe that Mary in Advent was not beyond such dilemmas. There was this vision of an angel with its strange message of motherhood to her, a virgin. There was Joseph’s dilemma: Should I marry her or not? Her parents were too close and were worried about her strange behavior. She agonized. What should she do? One thing she does do is to put on her shawl and trek some sixty miles—not a hardship for a peasant girl –to visit Cousin Elizabeth. Mary dearly needed a John the Baptist, someone to talk to, someone who would understand, and she knew that kind, older Elizabeth, John’s mother, would understand, would help her struggle with what she should do.
Then there are others, like the folk and the soldiers in today’s gospel who came to John the Baptist, who did not have family or economic matters on their minds, but rather the more basic matter of the state of their souls. They were there at a spiritual crossroad. They were there because they knew they needed to change their lives, to get out of the box. They had been stung by John’s words. Maybe he was on to something. Maybe it was time to get out of their spiritual and emotional rut. So, with some trepidation, they asked John, “What should we do?” And they asked with trepidation because they knew that any answer John gave would cost them something. That just goes with the territory. There would be some anxiety, some separation involved. A change of heart, repentance, an alteration of lifestyle would be demanded. Were they ready for that? Could they pay the price?
I think of one who did. I think of Dorothy Day, atheist and activist, living with her common-law husband, a man named Forster, on Staten Island. She is pregnant. She had been pregnant before by another man and had an abortion. This time, however, she was in love with Forster and she very much wanted that baby. But during the Advent of her pregnancy, she began to examine her life and the life she wanted for her child. Suddenly she began to pray. She began to read the fifteenth-century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ. She gradually came to desire that she must baptize her baby and not only baptize her, but baptize her Catholic.
A nun who ran a home for unwed mothers nearby proved to be her John the Baptist. She asked, “How can you have your baby baptized Catholic and not be one yourself?” That is, how can you not change? Dorothy Day thought and prayed. She was at a crossroad. What should she do? She decided to become a Catholic. At the time, of course, she had no notion that she would be up for canonization to be a saint because of her extraordinary love of and service to the poor, and her holy life. That would come later.
But meanwhile, it cost her, cost her dearly. Her friends abandoned her. But, most of all, it cost her her live-in husband. Listen to her poignant words from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness:
“It was killing me of leaving him. I loved him in every way, as a wife, as a mother; I even loved him for all he knew and pitied him for all he didn’t know. I loved him for all the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and sea shells he brought in with his fishing. I loved his integrity and his stubborn pride.”
There’s a woman in love! But what should she do? Forster was an anarchist with absolutely no interest in organized religion or organized anything for that matter. And Dorothy? She had found God and she had to make a decision. They parted. The cost was high but she became an authentic, centered, beautiful person.
Now let’s put ourselves into this Advent scene. For some the questions might be: What should I do to be authentic, not just a cookie-stamped consumer living like everyone else, grasping for the latest product that I think will give me some identity, some acceptance? What must I do to live an authentic life, a spiritual life? What should I do?
One who asked this was an eighteen year old Jim Martin who began his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School of Business, hoping a business degree could get him into a number of lucrative fields. At least he would get a high-paying job. So he took finance and accounting, got his degree, and settled in with a corporate program at General Electric. Pretty good. Of course, being young, he never asked himself the important questions: What do I desire in life? And what does God desire for me? What are my deepest desires?
He was working around the clock making big money, witnessing at times some dishonest and callous behavior in the corporate world, but there was always the paycheck. Still, his life seemed meaningless. One night, he came home to his apartment he shared with two other guys and, dead tired, got a drink and turned on TV. He happened to come across a public television documentary on Thomas Merton, the playboy turned Catholic, turned monk, turned mystic who had an enormous influence on millions of people through his writings. Martin bought his autobiography, the Seven Storey Mountain, found that Merton had struggled with the same questions as he, and the same addictions to pride, ambition, and selfishness. It made him think and reassess his own life and came back to his haunting question, “What should I do?” Eventually what he did was to quit his big job with the big salary and after a year of discernment became a Jesuit who ministered in the poor lands and in the academy and tells people of his fulfilled life now. Today he is the cultural editor of the Jesuit weekly, America.
We’re not that dramatic. We’re more in line with those ordinary folk who came to John the Baptist. And John is there to answer us as he did the people who came to him. He was, in his response to them, psychologically, right on. He did not offer elaborate programs as an answer. He said in effect, Take it one day at a time and start with simple things. “Whoever has two cloaks share with someone who had none,” he said. We who have more shirts, dresses, and shorts than our closets can handle should give some away. “Stop collecting more than is required,” John said to the tax collectors. Basically, John is saying to us, pick a value, one real value you want to adopt. Practice it. Give it time to catch on.
So, it’s Advent and the Advent question hangs there: What should I do? What should I, must I, do to be authentic, to live the life God has called me to live?
The old Indian was sharing his wisdom with his grandson. He told the grandson that we have two wolves inside us who struggle with each other. One is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other is the wolf of fear, greed, and hatred.
“Which wolf will win, Grandpa?” asked the grandson.
The wise man gave a John the Baptist answer, “Whichever one we feed.”