November 30. 2025

This morning at the 8 a.m. Masses, Mark and I were preparing to start the service. We realized that the Gospel book had not been set for today, and I sort of offhandedly quipped to Mark, "We'll just flip back to page 1," and sure enough, our reading today was page 1 in the Gospel book.

Because here we are, friends, back at the first Sunday in Advent, year A in our three-year lectionary cycle. We begin in the axiom of the Benedictine tradition that I've talked about the last few weeks. Here we are beginning again this journey once more into a new year, into a new season, into a new moment of life in our faith, an opportunity to deeper reflection and discernment of where we find ourselves and what we find ourselves called to do.

This, not only in the Christian tradition, but I think throughout the course of human history, this experience of... the cold darkness of winter. Those of us who've lived in the northern hemisphere have this sense of thinness in this time of the year, this experience that things kind of move in different ways, that the experience of linear time is not so very concrete, especially for us in the church, where our seasons of life, the way in which we live liturgically, is not linear, but instead, this kind of experience of a coiled reality. There is certainly some linearness. We begin this Sunday with my fifth year among you. And yet we return again and again. It's this sense of cyclicalness, even as we experience movement and growth. But it's also a thin time in this sense of a connection with the past, an orientation towards the future, a sense of living, maybe sometimes tenuously, in the present moment.

As I mentioned last week, Julie, Anna, and I took our yearly trip to Long Island. And this year, Anna was old enough that we spent a couple of days in New York City. And when we got up Sunday evening, we were staying in New Jersey, we got ourselves settled in the hotel, and I went for a run along the Hudson. And as I was running along the river, I heard a train whistle off in the distance. And it was this immediate sense of familiarity. And it struck me. It struck me profoundly because New York was always that place of otherness growing up in the Midwest and so-called flyover country. It was the place where all the big attention gets drawn. It's the place where all the major newscasters, all the major programs that we would watch on the television were centered, either New York or L.A. But it was the locus of everything that society seemed to care about. And it was always a dream to get there, to experience it, to have this sense of awe in the presence of such an important part of our social fabric and identity. And now, to do that so regularly is a kind of disorienting experience.

But in the moment of running along the Hudson hearing that train whistle, I was brought back to the full arc of my life. I actually went and looked this up after thinking about it, and I've never lived more than a couple of miles from train tracks. For the vast majority of my life, that auditory sound of the trains passing through is just a fundamental part of my reality. Larry McMurtry has this beautiful reflection in his first book on his Thalia series of listening to the Katy Railroad fly across the high plains of West Texas and envisioning what life must be like for those passing by on their way to some big place, some big... some big experience that's not the lonesome, isolated reality of High Plains ranch life. And in that moment of experiencing that train whistle on the Hudson, I was brought back into a present moment of all of these layered experiences and emotions that I've had throughout my life, these senses of location and dislocation, the ways in which all of that kind of comes together in the present moment.

How in many ways I feel the privilege and blessing of standing on the shoulders of my ancestors who toiled to offer the opportunity I have. My grandfather who grew up in a boxcar in a train yard for some years in his early life. To now have the experience, the privilege of the experience that I have is such a remarkable gift. But in this moment, this moment of kind of dark cold winter, this moment of advent, in this beginning anew, all of that sort of seems to be brought into this experience of the eternal present.

I was struck in reading all of our readings for this Sunday, that there's every single tense offered in these readings. Some reflection on what has been, where we have been in the past, some reflection on where we are in this present moment, and some reflection of where we are headed in this future time. All of it brought together in this moment of engagement, this moment of departure, this moment of this first Sunday of Advent.

And so friends, today as we gather, as we hear our Lord's admonition to stay awake once more, I invite us also in that process of staying awake or maybe becoming awoken to the reality of our Lord's presence anew. I invite us to embrace this time of thinness, to spend opportunities as they come up to step back, to take a moment in the quietness of this time of life, of this season of life, to feel the presence of the past, the present, and the future in this immediacy of the present moment, to reflect on this season of waiting, even as we look reflexively back on the first incarnation. This dual reality of celebrating what has been done, but what will be done anew in the coming age.

To be a people, a people of prayerfulness, that hear and sense the presence of our Lord, in a time where things seem very uncertain and chaotic. An opportunity to find a new grounding, a new steadiness, a new sense of calm, even in the midst of so much chaos. Because when we take those moments, those opportunities, those spaces where things feel thin, and we feel the realities of all that has come before and the possibilities of all that may come ahead. In those moments, especially, I think there is an opportunity for closer and deeper communion with our God who is even now outworking the realities of his kingdom in this present age. Even now is in breaking anew through the work of the Holy Spirit, in our lives, and in the lives of all, in our community and around the world.

And I invite us in this season of expectant waiting, to embrace this opportunity to be people of quiet, determined, prayerful contemplation, that we may be ever drawn more fully into the heart of our God. Who has been, is now, and will ever be, as he comes present to us again, and as we await his coming and his second return, in the fullness of time, and then the bringing of all things to completion.