Advent: Crying in the Wilderness

I'm drawn to this idea of spiritual mentorship, but I think there's more to carry away from John's story than even the inspired change we might associate with a blessed guide and friend.

Today in Advent when we hear about John the Baptist, what are we being called to do?

I think it is, like John, to cry out into the wilderness: "Prepare the way of the Lord . . . The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

To cry out into the wilderness that Jesus is coming into the world and it's time to change the way we live and work and love.

To cry out into the wilderness that a time is coming when who and what we are will finally make sense, because our little lives will be yoked to God's in a way that will give them ultimate meaning.

And what is the wilderness into which we're supposed to shout?

Maybe it's the season. Advent calls us to reflection and to preparation; the time of anticipation the secular world has named the Christmas season, which seems to begin, these days, sometime in October, calls us to busyness and consumption.

Maybe it's our society. Advent calls us to live in between, to savor the journey; Western society calls us to name and know our location at all times, and to consider the journey only a means to an end. What time is it? Where are you? When is it going to happen? All of these questions are antithetical to faithful waiting, which requires painful uncertainty.

Maybe it's ourselves. Advent calls us to open the way of the Lord, to knock down what stands in the way of that coming; our human natures want to hold onto the illusion of our own power, to cherish and clutch at the very impediments that prevent the Lord from coming into our lives. Our idols are not figures of stone or carved wood—but they are anything we choose to put our faith in and rely on besides God.

John the Baptist reminds us to focus on the coming kingdom and encourages us to do the hard work of looking inward. John the Baptist preaches change in the way we see ourselves, our world, and our relationship to God.

And John the Baptist encourages us to hope.

We could do far worse than to emulate him, to stand up and say that Jesus is coming, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

Not now, but soon.