Singing is an extremely difficult thing to do. You have to start by finding a pitch, establishing an appropriate internal sense of rhythm, and breathing in the exact precise way to start with the correct volume and tone of voice. Then you have to maintain all of this: you have to continue to sing the correct notes with the correct rhythm and the correct volume and tone of voice. As you are doing this, at least if you want to sing music as opposed to a gibberish collection of notes, you have to consider the shape of the entirety of the piece you are singing: where are the phrases? What are the key notes that need to be brought out? How does the music add to and supplement the text? What does the text tell you about how to interpret the music? Then you have to consider the context you are singing in: how resonant is the space? Who is the audience? Meanwhile, you continue to wage a constant battle on the pitch because, as soon as you lose attentiveness, the pitch starts to go flat, and once the drop starts it is nearly impossible to stop.
Doing all of this at once is impossible. In the background, behind any successful performance, is a great deal of practice spent getting not just the notes right, but also on getting the musical interpretation right. Behind that specific preparation is days, weeks and years of practice spent honing the craft, building the habits that make it easier to get the notes right and the musical interpretation appropriate, both by actively working and by listening to others. Only at the end of this process is a successful performance possible. Once enough time has been spent practicing, the music coalesces into a whole: you are no longer switching attention from musicality to pitch to rhythm and back to musicality, but all of it is done at once. It becomes almost as if the music is performing itself through you. You become more a vector through which the music is delivered, and less a separated, isolated individual.
Today, we start the season of Advent, the season during which we prepare for Christmas by meditating on the three “advents” of Christ: his coming in time, which we will celebrate on Christmas, his coming into our hearts, and his coming at the end of time. This First Sunday of Advent focuses our attention on that final coming: the second coming of Christ at the end of time, when all things will be renewed in Christ. Today’s Gospel reminds us to be watchful and alert for this. “You do not know when the time will come.” Jesus reminds us to keep a watch out for his return: “May (the lord of the house) not come suddenly and find you sleeping.” We must keep a watch for Christ’s return. The way we do that is by being careful about how we live our lives: by preparing ourselves to more fully receive Christ in our hearts. The end of all things will come unexpectedly, so we must live our lives in such a way that our hearts are always prepared.
This is analogous to singing. There will be a performance: at the end of our lives, we will stand before the throne of God, where he will sit in judgment upon us: he will look into our hearts, analyze our love of God and our love of our neighbors, and judge whether or not our heart can be perfected to receive the fullness of God. God will ask us what we have done with our lives? Have we done good? Have we avoided evil? Have we practiced virtue and spurned vice? These are the notes of the moral life, the basic building blocks without which a truly moral life is impossible. But, these actions, like musical notes, require a view of the whole, otherwise they are empty. Like music requires careful phrasing and a shape in order to truly speak, our moral life requires faith, hope and charity: it requires us to have made room for God in our hearts. The moral life requires a context for our actions that sees them in the light of God’s love for us. Putting together all of these parts, God will perfectly judge whether we are capable of acting in accord with His will, or are capable only of following our own desires. If we are capable of acting in accord with His will, God will rend the heavens, and come down. He will fill us with His love.
Although this culminates at the end of time, and at the end of our lives, that is not when it starts. This starts now! We must be watchful! If we wait until we are standing before the throne of God to act in accord with His will, we will make ourselves incapable of receiving Him. If all we practice is following our own desires, that will become all we are capable of doing.
And yet, when we look honestly at ourselves, and look around at the world, this seems like the universal pattern. Isaiah recognizes this condition, and directly questions it. “Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” Why does God permit us to turn our backs to him, abandoning Him to follow the things that we think we want, but that God knows cannot fulfill us? Isaiah looks around at his world, and tells God, as any of us might, “There is none who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to cling to you; for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt.” Nevertheless, there is still hope. “Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter; we are all the work of your hands.” Our hope is rooted in God’s love for us. In fact, God does not abandon us: we, all of us, abandon Him. We fall asleep.
This raises the central question of today: one of the central questions for each of our lives: how do we restore and then maintain wakefulness? How do we keep ourselves practicing the Good. How do we prepare for the return of the master of the house, which can happen at any moment.
St. Paul tells the Corinthians, “I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus … so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Through grace, through a gift that God gives us, we become capable of truly practicing the Good. But this is a practice that must be actively maintained: it must actually be practice: it requires work. Grace is a gift, one that opens our hearts. But we can reject it, and close our hearts. We can sin. In fact, all of us do sin, just as we all tend towards going flat when we sing. And just as starting to go flat creates the inevitability of a precipitous decline, starting to sin and closing ourselves to God opens ourselves up to greater and greater sins.
As this letter continues, it becomes clear that the Corinthians are not, in fact, irreproachable. Paul reproaches them for dividing themselves in factions, for the greed that the wealthy among them are exercising, and for tolerating grievous sins. Some of them have fallen asleep, and need to be woken up. Some of them have stopped practicing, and have become lazy. They have started the seemingly inevitable decline into sin. It is easy to recognize ourselves in the reproaches Paul has for the Corinthians.
The Church responds as Paul does to the Corinthians: with a reminder, that serves as both a blessing and a warning. We have a chance to reset our relationship with God, to pause, hear the note we should be singing, and reset the pitch. The reminder is Advent: Christ is coming. The master of the house is at the door of our hearts, asking to be invited in. Are you awake?
Fr. Edward Mazuski currently serves the community as novice master, junior master, secretary of the monastic council, and teaches in the mathematics department in Portsmouth Abbey School.
To learn more about Fr. Edward, please click on his picture to the left or click here.