GOD'S GONE MISSING!

In thinking about Advent as the season for wake-up calls, I am reminded of the story of two naughty little boys at the local Catholic primary school. The teachers had tried everything to make them behave—time-outs, notes home, detention—but all to no avail. Finally, in desperation, the two little boys were sent to the parish priest to see whether he could straighten them out.

The first boy went in and sat down in a chair across the desk from the priest. Father came straight to the point and asked, ‘Young man, do you know where God is?’ The little boy just sat there. The priest stood up and asked, ‘Son, do you know where God is?’ The little boy trembled and said nothing. Father then leaned across the desk and asked a third time, ‘Do you know where God is?’

The little boy then bolted out of the chair, ran past his friend in the waiting room, and sprinted all the way home. He got into bed and pulled the covers up over his head. His friend followed him home and asked, ‘What happened in there?’

The boy replied, ‘God’s gone missing … and they think we did it!’

When God goes missing these days, it is because we have gone missing somewhere in the process too. In her fine book, The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris writes that ‘we fall apart, and our world falls apart, when God is absent from our hearts.’ As a theology student in Melbourne in the 1970s I can remember hearing a splendid lecture by the Master of Ormond College at the time, Dr Davis McCaughey, challenging us students to ‘keep the rumour of God alive’. Thirty years on, I wonder whether God’s existence is any more than a rumour for many people.

If God has gone missing for us in recent times and his presence is little more than a rumour, then it is timely that Advent is our big wake-up call. ‘Stay awake’ is one of those strident messages we hear through the readings in this season.

Advent is a transition time from endings to beginnings. In the northern hemisphere, the days are getting shorter and colder as they move towards December 21, but for us in the southern hemisphere it is the opposite. The days are getting longer and warmer.

Whatever the difference, the old year is ending—hence all those images of death and destruction that surface throughout the readings of Advent. The old year is dying and a new one is about to begin. Advent is the season of transition.

In a sense we are always in transition and we should be. I recall fellow Jesuit Father Gerald Coleman, in his typically provocative way, once taking great delight in pointing out to me a feature of a particular statue of St Ignatius I had never noticed before. Despite passing this striking figure of Ignatius many times each day, I was always oblivious to the two words inscribed at the bottom—‘The Pilgrim.’ Ignatius looked on himself and spoke and wrote of himself as a ‘pilgrim’.

In the latter part of the 19th century, an American tourist paid a visit to a famous Polish rabbi, Hofetz Chaim. He was astonished to see that the rabbi’s dwelling was just a simple room with a desk and a chair. ‘Rabbi’, asked the tourist, ‘where is your furniture?’ ‘Where is yours?’ replied the Rabbi. ‘Mine?’ asked the puzzled American, ‘But I am only a visitor here. I’m only passing through.’ To which the Rabbi responded, ‘Aren’t we all?’

We are all pilgrims in this life, of course, we are all just passing through. Advent reminds us that we all need to have this spirit of being a pilgrim, of being travellers in transition. If we focus on things, and lose sight of God in them, we lose our way. God goes missing.

To be a pilgrim one has to travel light; we cannot afford to carry too much inner baggage. Those of us who do carry additional burdens, like resentments and failures to forgive, will not move very far in life at all. The way we travel is just as important, if not more important, than arriving at a destination.

We will stumble on our journey from time to time and take wrong routes, but that is better than sitting still. We are never alone. Advent reminds us that God is not just at the beginning and end of our travels but in every step along the road.