As we begin the start of a new Church year on this first Sunday of Advent, preparing for the Lord’s coming, I welcome some reflection and thought on God as an Artist, as Creator, as the One who brought something from nothing. On a human level, if we think of God being alone at one time, where there was no physical creation as we know it, we tend to think that God must have felt alone. That the Lord somehow knew loneliness. This would be true of Jesus as the Second Person on the Trinity during his ministry, notably when his friends abandoned him in his hour of greatest need. it would be fair to say our Lord Jesus experienced the deepest sense of loneliness that a human being can know. That his loneliness, even though his heavenly Father never abandoned him for a moment in time, went to the core of his holy soul. Those who ran away from Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when the authorities came looking to arrest him, when Judas fulfilled his dirty deed of betrayal, their running away set in motion a path of intense loneliness Jesus was forced to confront in the presence of other people who were not his friends. So yes, God does know, in the Person of Jesus, the horror many folks have known throughout the ages at one time or another in their lives; the experience of loneliness.
However, God, who is eternal and transcendent, who is totally other, never knew, and never will know, the reality of loneliness. In other words, God did not need to create human beings to fill himself up in some way of emotional fulfillment. The Lord of all, the Creator of the stars, had no need to create us, his most prized creation, except for the reason to share his infinite, abundant love, which is the essence of his being. The Lord created us not to somehow remove any potential loneliness that God never knew, but rather we have been “established” as the most perfect extension of his essence, his love that knows no bounds. And the most natural disposition we can have as persons made in God’s image and likeness is to worship, not the things God created, nor other people who have the same worth as we do, no matter who they are, what they do, how much money they have, how famous they’ve become, but to worship God alone as our sole Creator.
We experience our deepest form of loneliness when humans lack love for God. Sadly, such love is absent in the lives of many folks in the present time. Likely, this has always been the truth over the generations and centuries. That people have allowed worldly things, passing things, things that create a roadblock between our love for the world we can see, and our love for the invisible God we cannot see. It’s more possible – and natural - to live without loneliness, absent the disposition that we must possess passing things in order to satisfy our internal wants, if we were graced and blessed with an initial love for God as the stepping-stone in our lives. This is easier said than done, as we live in a world of countless religions with beliefs that range from good and holy, to evil and violence. It’s usually not hard to tell one from the other: “You will know them by their fruits.” Good tasting or sour fruit. But the greatest form of loneliness we can know in this life is the type of internal isolation that results from rejecting or ignoring our own Creator. How can this not be the case when God the Artist formed us and shaped us as the work of his very hands?
We hear this beautiful truth proclaimed in God’s word this first Sunday of Advent from Isaiah, that “we are the work of your hands.” I guess I’m flabbergasted that any person would not embrace in their lives these words that allow us to truly see who we are, and where we came from. Even science will tell us rightly that at one time – before time - there was nothing. God bless the gift of science the Lord has given to humanity. Science allows us to arrive at certain truths about the human person, as well as about the world and universe in which God called forth. Science is not meant to replace the one and only God who created science, a discipline that did not exist at one time, nor the many beautiful teachings that God has revealed in and through his Church, the Bride of Christ. But without question, science is one of the great gifts that flowed from the words, “Let there be light,” while being subject to both God and his most prized creation, the human race. Anyone who replaces God with science has replaced the Infinite (God) with the finite (science, which did not exist at one time except in the mind of God). We the people are the work of God’s hands, God the Artist, and not the work of any part of the created order. We are his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel and Pieta rolled into one multiplied by infinity, if that makes sense.
As we move toward the holy season of Christmas in preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, it is good for us to reflect upon the honor of our dignity in this present wayward world of violence and war. Being made by the hand of God with the capacity to understand this statement of truth, reflect upon it and make it our own, is why Jesus pursues the Father’s will to come and save us for eternal life. Which is much better than being a goat (not the Tom Brady type of goat, but one who refuses God’s will of feeding the hungry, etc.) on the left of our Lord’s hand, the same hand that created us, being thrust down to live with the Devil and his angels. Life with the Devil and his angels forever is a reflection I prefer to avoid, if possible, while making this potential image and reality a lesser part of my Christian spirituality, just enough to know this can happen if I fail to remember how God is my Creator, my Savior, and my Maker by hand.
Advent is a short season that calls us to take advantage of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. That we reconcile our lives with our Creator through God’s abundant mercy and loving forgiveness. As we know (I pray), there are times throughout the weeks, months, and years when we lose sight of the great truth that our very existence is the work of God’s holy hand. We live in a world that determines who is beautiful and who is not by virtue of their “looks.” If this is the determining factor for human beauty, then where does this leave St. Teresa of Calcutta? She was too short to be a model as we understand the word in a secular way. She was not pretty enough to do commercials for companies who seek to take advantage of physical looks to sell their product for the purpose of satisfying their shareholders. She was not athletic enough to make the grade in sports like soccer, basketball, softball, or tennis (she was shorter than the net). And she was certainly not royalty or rich enough to buy her way into the limelight through social media or any other source that leads to fame. Yet, she was all of these and more. Why? Because she understood herself to be the work of God’s hand, thus, a humble servant who changed the world for the better. If the world was filled with Mother Teresa’s, there would be no violence or wars. There would still be poor people, whom Jesus said we will always have, being personally cared for through hands and hearts made by the hand of God.
Where we have fallen short in the understanding that God’s hand has made us and willed us into being, we’re invited through the meaning of this season to come back to Jesus in fullness. The fullness of who we are and meant to be as a Christian. Our Catholic faith through Jesus’ invitation has opened the door to the confessional so that we can return to the Divine place of “we are all the work of your hands.” The Sacrament of Penance returns us to the place in life where we do our best work in the name of Jesus. So much of what we deal with day in and day out can chisel down our bodies and souls, preventing us from being full agents for Christ. And by doing this to us, we can lose sight that we are the prized portrait and drawing of God’s hand. The power of this Sacrament is God’s mercy applied to the entirety of our lives. God is total in his mercy when we seek it. As I like to say, we go through Ernie’s Car Wash; go in dirty, come out clean, about the same amount of time it takes to go through the scrubs, rubs, and dubs of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. What’s even better is the cost: it’s free. God’s mercy touching our bodies and souls is priceless, but the cost we pay is pretty cheap. It’s not always easy, but naming our honesty with no holding back about our personal faults is a cheap price to pay for total spiritual cleanliness.
A couple of months down the road I pray we say to our brothers and sisters in the Lord, “I hope and pray you have a good Lent.” The same can be said regarding the season of Advent, a brief time (half of Lent) that we can call a lesser Lent, a penitential season, but no less important in returning our relationship with the Lord to its proper place. What better way to reseal our lives with the One whose hand made us for holiness and charity. May this Advent be a religious time spent well by each of us, as we look forward once again to the true meaning of Christmas.