December 4/First Monday of Advent
In days to come, the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills. ~ Isaiah 2.1
In the past year or so it has felt as if the world is unraveling. Global violence and terror, political division and social acrimony, storms and fires and floods, the plight posed by immigration, the shocking lack of grown-up leadership everywhere one looks – all of these are dismaying and troubling to anyone who is paying attention. We desperately need a vision of hope. And the prophet Isaiah — writing perhaps as early as the 8th century before Christ’s birth, in another era of turmoil and division — brings us one today. He draws a portrait of the Lord’s house as a place of learning and justice; a bulwark of wisdom, to which all the nations ascend; a place of peace, in which weapons that destroy are transmuted into farming tools that create. And he beckons us to be better and to do better than our coarsened culture and splenetic discourse would have us be and do. Isaiah calls us to lift our eyes from their downward fixation on the mire and muck and to train them upwards in hope and faith. He counsels us not to succumb to our basest instincts, but to strive for the heights of kindness, forbearance, peace. Expressing our ugliest, nastiest thoughts under cover of anonymity may provide a momentary rush of angry satisfaction, but will not point us to that holy mountain. Through his prophet, God calls us, urging us to make the twisting and laborious ascent to where he dwells in wisdom, holiness, and love. This is the journey of a lifetime, and there is no better season in which to take it up than Advent. Do we have the courage to step out of the lowlands and climb upward in faith and trust to that shining city on a hill?
Lord of the hills and valleys, the mountains and the plains, Accompany me as I make my way up the slopes of your holy mountain, and keep my eyes ever focused on you. Amen.
To hear the Ensemble Di Musica Antica Del Conservatorio Di Vicenza sing “Ad te levavi animam meam” (Unto you have I lifted up my soul) by 16th-century Venetian composer Lodovico Balbi, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSiA7av-ym8
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120423.cfm
