The Threshold of the House of God

Dear Friend,

As I write this, Christmas is one week away, which means that this coming Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Advent, begins a new “week” of Advent that will last less than a day. A disconcerting fact, maybe, but we did get a head’s up a week ago at Mass: “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day…” (2 Peter: 9).  

Part of the wisdom of liturgical time for us as Catholics is that being guided by the lunar cycle can remind us that our ways are not always God’s ways, and that our time is not always God’s time. To expect it to be otherwise is a cause for real discomfort, for me anyway.  

In our parish Advent retreat, Sister Leanne Hubbard provided us with a graphic that was very helpful to me along these lines. To illustrate the Kingdom of God, she sketched out two shoes (with nice big shoelaces) at the end of two little legs. Under the right shoe she wrote “now, the world” and under the left “not yet, the world to come”. Under both – connecting them – she wrote: REIGN OF GOD. BOTH/AND.  

The image tells me that my path of discipleship is a way of learning how to walk all over again - one foot in time, the other in eternity, as though traversing an elongated threshold where time and eternity begin to meet – the threshold of the house of God (ps. 84). In Jesus as “the little one”, God has already begun to slip into time. As I ponder the Christmas creche I recall the words of St. Teresa of Avila: “All the way to heaven is heaven because Christ is the Way…” Happy Advent: Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor