Patiently seeing beyond appearances

The texts of the Roman Catholic Lectionary for the fourth Sunday of Advent call us to two difficult practices for our times, patience and seeing beyond appearances. A response to living in an impatient world is to teach techniques for people to achieve goals quickly in ways which indentify “low hanging fruit” and “opportunity ventures”. These strategies have produced results. Have they produced progress? What is the balance to immediate gratification? We should not “judge the book by its cover” but rather than patiently working through the “book” we try to make the”cover” more attractive to entice the reader to continue. The authority to allow us to wait and to struggle to see and understand is the Promise from the Divine that our patient plodding and pondering is the key to significant progress in our personal pursuit of place and peace. (The progression of “p” words is a mental pathway for reflection). Fr Larry Gillick SJ writes with openness on the topics of patience, longing and standing at the ‘stable’ and seeing, like Joseph, more than meets the eye. Tradition holds that Joseph, a man of prayer and patience, is approached prior to the death of Mary’s parents to be guardian of Mary when she leaves the protection of the Temple at the age of twelve. The man who has experienced the communion with the Divine, through dreams at times, is prepared to patiently consider the time scale of the action of God is entirely not the understanding of humanity which lives “in the time”. Time is not finite and linear in the universe of the Eternal and Omnipotent. The “God is with us” promised through Isaiah to Ahaz and to Joseph through the angel is the understanding of the Intimate relationship experienced by believers who like Paul live with the resurrected Jesus as the Body which carries, in Paul’s case today, the Good News of the fruit of patience and vision to the Gentiles.