Advent Alarm Clock--Get it Now!

Listen Now!
Praise the Lord! Get up! Wake up! Get you butt out of bed! Get going! Hit the alarm clock and roll over and sleep for another few minutes. You can sleep for just a bit more. Don't worry about getting to where you gotta go! We know the argument inside our head all to well. To jump out of bed and face the day or to lay around. Often, however, we are in no position to lay around and just do nothing. We have jobs to get to, appointments to make, kids to get up, breakfast to cook, things to do! The hectic daily grind begins and we begin to jump from one thing to another and it all started with that alarming alarm clock shaking us from our slumber and unconscious stupor.
The time of Advent is like our liturgical alarm clock, a buzzing of things to come, a reminder that there is something to come later. This season of Advent is not supposed to be an ominous foreboding of what is to come. We're not supposed to hit the snooze on this Advent alarm clock because of the drudgery of routine, but we are to have our spiritual deep sleep awakened by the alarming notion of this person of Jesus Christ who is to come to us. And the time of Advent is not supposed to be a weary expectation of what is to come, but an anticipatory wait for the coming of Jesus Christ. Advent means arrival, a time of awakening, a stirring of our spiritual stagnation...an alarm clock!
As Jesus says, “Stay awake!” Or as St. Paul says, “...it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.” And Jesus is that startling noise that wakes us up. In Jesus Christ, we are called forth from the darkness of our lives. He calls us to, “throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” Move from that dark bedroom of fear, open up the blinds and get your life in gear! This is the message of Jesus Christ! Wake up! Stop sleep walking through life and feeling sorry for yourself and jump out of bed!
There is a temptation in life to laxidazically and haphazardly approach the daily grind. Now this past week, I struggled with this temptation. That dangerous spiritual place to be where you begin to think that you have it so difficult that there is too much to do and why even bother. That attitude that you should be expecting things from life rather than giving into it. That dangerous place of laying in bed asking yourself whether it is worth it or not to get up and face the duties that life has handed to you. But then Advent comes, Jesus comes and says, “Wake up!” The hour is now!
The message of the Gospel is just this! It is to knock us from complacency and challenge us to engage life and to live it to the full. We can too easily begin to believe that Catholicism is boring and humdrum and that all these “rules” of the Church are to put a damper from us truly enjoying life. This is Puritanism or the heresy of Jansinism, this is not true Catholicism. To be truly Catholic is to engage life, to wake up, to live in expectation of something good to come. Being a Catholic means not simply living life as a boring mantra of routine, but to approach our days in joy and love. It means seeing the providence of a situation and embracing the inconvenience and recognizing it as an opportunity for grace. That is the confrontation of the Gospel!
There is yet another aspect of Jesus' call for us to awake. Often after hitting that alarm clock snooze button we begin to think of the tasks that are to be accomplished for that day. What ends up happening is that life becomes a moving from one hectic and empty routine to another. We fill our lives with events and circumstances that relegates life to a jumping from one thing to another without really ever realizing the grace-filled moments that make life worth living. This Advent season can be a time to avoid these spiritual pit falls and sincerely prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus Christ in our hearts.
Father Tom Butler, a parish priest from Hillsdale, MI was someone instrumental in my own conversion about seven years ago. Through the grace of God, Father Tom helped me to wake up and move from a spiritual darkness to the light. At the end of his Mass while everyone was sitting before the closing prayer he would ask, “The Good News for all of us is what? The congregation would reply, “That God loves us.” And he would say, “That's right! And he gives us a reason to get up in the morning so let's get up!” Those were always words of encouragement through the years of college for me and a reminder of the reason for my existence.
So what are we to do! We are to wake up! We are to find the peace that comes with surrendering ourselves to God's peace and making Advent a preparation for living life not as a begrudging routine, but as an adventure of faith. We are to see our daily lives not as a series of events that we are to cross off a boring “to do” list, but as unique and providential opportunities to see Christ in others and in the world. Being Catholic Christian and seriously waking up from sin and selfishness will open our hearts to the light of a new morning. It will give us hope during those times when it is hard to get up again and it will give us the joy of anticipating something remarkable in a few weeks, the advent of Christ in our lives.