O Christ! Christ, Come QUICKLY!

My last post suggested the “watch” as defense against threat.  But Advent is a watch not against conquest, but a watch for liberation.  I find myself needing this reminder on this morning after what is called “Black Friday” and before the First Sunday of Advent.  The shopping madness is called “Black Friday” because, we’re told, lots of stores run the whole year in the red, at a loss, and only turn profitable after the holiday shopping surge.  But I think of it as a reminder of the darkness that we create by shading our eyes from the light. 

This morning, if we care to look, we can find all kinds of stories of the madness of yesterday’s bargain-hunting bedlam.  Despite this binge, the likelihood of a profitable year for merchants and suppliers is in doubt because of the weak economy not only here in the U.S., but in Europe as well.  Today’s financial front pages are full of frightening headlines…just as yesterday’s and last week’s and last month’s were.  The Arab Spring seems to have sowed a lot of seeds on rocky ground.  The Supercommittee turns out not to have been super at all.

Perhaps this is why when I realized that Advent was coming, I realized that my watch for the coming of Hope was urgent.  “Come, Lord Jesus, Come” was not sung sotto voce but emerged as a shout!  “O Christ!  Christ, come QUICKLY!"  I am reading, thanks to one of my friends from Tuesday mornings, Exiles, a Novel by Ron Hansen, about Gerard Manley Hopkins… and the five young German Nuns whose death at sea inspired his greatest poem “Wreck of the Deutschland”.  There on Tuesday morning as we prayed for the coming, yet again, of the Son of God, I found myself calling out as the 28 year-old Sister did, 

Away in the loveable west,	185
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails	190
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

Hopkins wrote from his safety in Wales, torn to his heart as he imagined them in the gales.  If not for ourselves in the relative safety from which we access this internet, then for those in the storm, must we not cry out?  And as I reflect on the madness of “Black Friday” and other distractions, I find insight in the way that 78 people (including the five newly-vowed nuns of Hopkins’ poem) died.  The S.S. Deutschland did notsink in the depths of the ocean.  It ran aground in shallow water 15 miles from shore - water too deep to sail in but deep enough to drown.

Perhaps we too are aground, stuck while the world swirls around us.  Or perhaps like Hopkins we are in safety as others drown.  Or perhaps we are just oblivious, wrapped in our safe isolation.