Last week we were all keeping vigil lest we miss the
advent of Isabel, great blower of tempests and wreaker of destruction
along the seaboard of the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, we who live in
landlocked Pennsylvania were more curious than threatened.
Isabel came and went. The storm wreaked some death and destruction,
but it didn’t approach end-of-the-world” status, which
seemed to be just what the weather people wanted us to believe.
Of course they wanted us to believe it. So much coverage building
up our anxiety levels is just evidence that they wanted us to be fully
aware of the looming dark clouds and coming winds.
Pennsylvania was rained on. The wind became a little gusty, but most
of us survived. It didn’t reach “killer” status.
The dictum is true: where there is no news, make news.
Consequently . . . Get ready! Watch! The great
storm gods are sending their goddess of death by deluge! So, we waited.
In a couple of months we enter the season of waiting, another kind
of advent . . . this time, the liturgical one.
We anticipate the coming of Jesus, now and far off. Our messiah will
return for us.
I learned of another community who knows that their messiah will come
again.
I was dumbstruck when I learned about this Jewish cult in Brooklyn,
which awaits the return of their messiah. Yes, they had one, and he
died, and he will come back again.
He was their head rabbi and had worked wonderful things for them.
Since he died, they have prayed and danced and sung and believed that
he will come soon and very soon.
(No, they sing something in Hebrew and not Andraé Crouch’s
“Soon and Very Soon.”)
There have been two messiahs before this one from Brooklyn. The first
was Jesus. The second one was in the latter half of the 1600s. He
didn’t really come back. He simply just became a Muslim.
Now, don’t you think that would tick off even the most faithful
disciple?
Unlike the community in Brooklyn, we know our waiting will stop when
we begin our rituals to celebrate the historic coming of Jesus in
our Christmas liturgies. There is a growing awareness that the Advent
waiting is inextricably linked to the final coming.
Our liturgical tradition, proudly, predates by at least a thousand
or so years the current preoccupation of the governmental fundamentalists
obsessed with the second coming of Jesus—only after their perfect
good will triumph over perfect evil.
Thank God for mature Christians who openly wait in quiet joy for that
coming great day.
Oy, Parousia!
There is another brand of waiting we all are experiencing. It’s
our waiting to see what will develop with this incredible neanderthal
list of retro-reforms the Roman Curia has launched.
By the time you are reading this, all of Christendom will learn about
the edicts that are in a draft from an unknown agency, evaluated by
nameless cardinals and bishops, and have the markings of the church
going into a separation mode.
How it all pans out, we won’t know. But in the meantime we wait.
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net
