The shaking of Advent

Once again we struggle in the wake of events this week in Sydney: a city in lockdown, hostages held in terrifying conditions, two innocent people killed in the early hours of the morning.

How are we to make sense of the senseless? Alfred Delp, a young Jesuit priest in Munich who was ultimately executed by the Nazi regime, posed the following answer in his sermon on the first Sunday of Advent in 1941:

Perhaps what we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it. Perhaps that is the ultimate answer to the question of why God has sent us into this time, why He permits this whirlwind to go over the earth, and why He holds us in such a state of chaos and in hopelessness and in darkness—and why there is no end in sight. It is because we have stood here on the earth with a totally false and inauthentic sense of security. So now, God lets the earth resound, and now He shudders it, and then He shakes it, not to call forth a false anxiety... He does it to teach us one thing again: how to be moved in spirit. 

Much of what is happening today would not be happening if people were in that state of inner movement and restlessness of heart in which man comes into the presence of God the Lord and gains a clear view of things as they really are. Then man would have let go of much that has thrown all our lives into disorder one way or another and has thrashed and smashed our lives... Instead, man stood on this earth in a false pathos and a false security, under a deep delusion in which he really believed he could single-handedly fetch stars from heaven; could enkindle eternal lights in the world and avert all danger from himself... 

That is the first Advent message: before the end, the world will be set quaking. And only where man does not cling inwardly to false security will his eyes be capable of seeing the Ultimate.

Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings, 1941-1944