photo by Nikita Linkin on Unsplash

 

O Lord, today we know once more, and in quite practical terms,

    what it means to clear away rubble and make paths smooth again.

We will have to know it and do it for years to come.

Let the crying voices ring out, pointing out the wilderness 

    and overcoming the devastation from within.

May the Advent figure of John,

    the relentless envoy and prophet in God’s name,

    be no stranger in our wilderness of ruins.

For how shall we hear unless someone cries out

    above the tumult and destruction and delusion?

 

Your Advent message comes out of an encounter of man

    with the absolute, the final, the gospel.

It is thus the message that shakes – 

    so that in the end the world shall be shaken.

The fact that the Son of Man shall come 

    is more than a historic prophecy;

  it is also a decree, 

    that Your coming and the shaking of humanity 

        are somehow connected.

If we are inwardly unshaken, 

    inwardly incapable of being genuinely shaken,

if we become obstinate and hard and superficial and cheap,

    then You will yourself intervene in world events

    and teach us what it means to be placed in this agitation 

    and stirred inwardly.

 

Allow us to live in today’s Advent, for it is the time of promise.

To eyes that do not see, it still seems that the final dice 

    are being cast down in these valleys, on those battlefields,

    in those camps and prisons and bomb shelters.

But just beyond the horizon the eternal realities

    stand silent in their age-old longing.

There shines on us the first mild light 

    of the radiant fulfillment to come.

From afar sound the first notes as of pipes and singing,

    not yet discernable as a song or melody.

It is all far off still, and only just announced and foretold.

But it is happening. This is today.

And tomorrow the angels will tell what has happened 

    with loud rejoicing voices,

  and we shall know it and be glad,

    if we have believed and trusted in Advent.

 

Alfred Delp, 1907-1945, German Jesuit, executed for resistance to Nazism

Watch for the Light freely adapted

 

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In those days John the Baptist came, 

   preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, 

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”