Are You Ready?

"The good news is always beginning somewhere in the world, for those with ears to hear and hearts to go wherever the way may lead."

-Barbara Brown Taylor

"Therefore you also must be ready. . . ."

-Matthew 24: 44

I still have my old, battered childhood copy of The Night Before Christmas; Christmas is not Christmas until it has been brought out and the beloved, tattered pages have been read and looked at once again. (I confess that I still take a look out the window before I go to bed on Christmas Eve, hoping for the distant sound of bells or for the glimpse of reindeer.) I am fortunate, I realize, to have really good memories of Christmas.

So the other day when I was home all alone, and Sabrina had taken our son Josh back to school in Vermont, I started a fire in the fireplace, put on an old LP of the Kings College Choir singing carols, poured myself a glass of wine, and took out some of our family picture albums.

I know: what was I thinking?

Soon I had tears in my eyes. There were pictures from my son Benjamin’s first Christmas in faraway Minnesota, pictures from our six Christmases on Elmwood Avenue in Attleboro, when both the boys were small, pictures of Christmases in our house in Penobscot, Maine. Not only were the boys--now fully grown young men--small then, but Sabrina and I were remarkably younger.

That first Christmas in Minnesota seems like only yesterday. Only yesterday, we were wondering if we could afford to buy the kids Playmobile toys for Christmas. (A warning for you parents of little ones: the toys only get bigger and more expensive, and they aren’t nearly as much fun.) Only yesterday I was fixing up that antique, Flexible Flyer sled I had bought at the Murray Church fair for Ben’s Christmas present.

I remember the first time he used it, at Diamond Hill, in Cumberland, Rhode Island. He couldn’t have been much more than three or four years old, and he went right to the top of this incredibly steep, amazingly crowded sledding hill and came flying down it at about a hundred miles an hour, not really knowing how to steer, yet, somehow managing to miss all the other sledders. How he made it I will never know. I knew that if he killed himself, there would be hell to pay when I got home. When he got to the bottom of that hill he had the biggest smile you could ever hope to see. And immediately did it all over again.

We’ve always managed to have good Christmases, and, because of my peculiar line of work, and the fact that I have always been employed on Christmas Eve, wherever we have lived we have always had an excuse to be in our own house on Christmas morning. Just the two, then three, then four of us. Christmas is our day. And what a day it is, and has been!

And so I spent a good hour listening to carols, looking at old pictures, crying into my wine, and wondering where the time had gone. Maudlin, perhaps, and not without some tinge of regret, but cathartic, too, and a necessary reminder of the preciousness of the present.

We have now entered the season of Advent, which for Christians is a time of expectation, waiting, watchfulness, and readiness. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Christians are supposed to ready themselves for the arrival of a mythical "Son of Man." No one knows quite what this moniker means, though some Christians believe that it refers to the return of Jesus himself.

I confess I don’t have much interest in theories about a second coming. (I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of living up to the first one, yet.) But I am very interested in that state of readiness in which Christians are supposed to hold themselves. That state of readiness, it seems to me, is something that we, all of us, could benefit from.

Advent is, among other things, a reminder of the brevity of life. It is a reminder to pay attention every single moment of our lives. This is hard. Too often we get caught up in the difficulties of the moment, in the hassles of the day, in all the little, unimportant things, and we completely forget to pay attention. Instead of holding ourselves in readiness for whatever amazing thing might happen next, days, weeks, months, and years of our lives go by, and we hardly notice what has happened. We look at those pictures of our children, and we can’t understand where the time has gone. When did they grow up? How did I miss it? What could possibly have been so important that I wanted to hurry the time along, that I couldn’t take the time to look and savor and enjoy, that I just didn’t pay enough attention?

John Lennon once famously said that "Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans." Why can’t we stash the plans? Why do we think they are so important? Either there will be time in the future or there will not. Why can’t we live our lives in the here and now?

My sentimental journey backward in time to Christmas past was a reminder to hold myself in readiness. It was a reminder to be ready to see the miracle when it happens, because it will happen suddenly, inevitably, and in the middle of the most ordinary and even the most mundane moment, and if you are not awake to it you will surely miss it. If you are busy making other plans, you will miss it.

That is, I think, the message of the Buddha, as we learned in the morning’s reading. Asked whether he was "a god, a spirit, or an angel," he replied, "None of these. I am awake!" Is it possible that enlightenment resides in such a simple act as wakefulness? That nirvana is right under our noses, so to speak, if only we would take the time to wake up and notice? That all that really matters is contained in this present moment, the one unfolding right now, even as we sit here in our pews and stare out the windows into the glorious light of day, of this day, a day like no other?

Thoreau thought so. "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep." In an essay entitled "Early Spring in Massachusetts," he wrote, "When we wake indeed with a double awakening, not only from our ordinary nocturnal slumbering, but from our [daily], we burst through the thallus of our ordinary life, we awake with emphasis."

How do people not stay awake? How do I not stay awake? How can we sleepwalk through life? Francine Bray writes that in perusing the Advent texts in the New Testament, she prefers "thinking of the phrases ‘keep awake’ and ‘be ready’ as referring to a way of life, much like the life lived by Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth century monk. In all that he did each day Brother Lawrence practiced the presence of God ‘perpetually,’ as he said. He practiced this mindfulness from the time he entered the Benedictine monastery at eighteen years old until he died at age eighty. These words in Matthew," she says, "‘keep awake’ and ‘be ready,’ might help us remember to keep our hearts and minds on that which is most important."

How do we hold ourselves in a state of constant readiness? How do we make ourselves remember that which is most important? How can we not?

But, of course, we don’t. The difficulty of remaining truly awake is illustrated by the fact that the Buddha is known as "the Enlightened One." Thoreau couldn’t manage it all the time, though he tried, and he left a pretty good record in Walden of what we can see when we really pay attention to the world around, and, just as importantly, within us. Most of us cannot stay mindful all the time, but I daresay that we can all be more mindful than we are.

I wish I had paid more attention as my kids were growing up.

I wish I had not wished the time away as much as I did. I wish I had been able to live more in the moment. I wish I had appreciated all the moments, even the most trying ones, more than I have.

Let my failure be a warning to you. Not that it is a terrible or singular failure, because most of us fail in much the same way, at least some of the time. But because life is precious: each and every moment is precious, but most precious of all is this present moment. It is the only moment of which you or I can be certain. As the familiar words of the ancient poet Kalidasa remind us, "Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life! In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence: the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty." Enjoy this moment, take the time to savor it. Don’t rush it. It will never come again. Ever. While your children are still small, remind yourself that this is a never-to-be-repeated time in your and their lives.

How, then, can we be impatient for the future, for the tomorrow which will bring forth we-know-not-what, for the future which, as Kalidasa reminds us, "is only a dream"? That future, with all its sorrow and joy, is, gratefully, closed to us. But we have this present moment, and we had better appreciate it while we can. Not that there will not be other good times; perhaps, for some of us, far better times: but we can’t be certain of them.

"The religious quest," wrote Karen Armstrong, "is not about discovering ‘the truth’ or ‘the meaning of life,’ but about living as intensely as possible in the here and now." This is important, she says, because living thus makes us "more human." It makes us more compassionate toward the shortcomings of others, and of ourselves. There is an ethical component to this awareness, to this living intensely and "keeping ourselves awake," as Thoreau suggests:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every [one] is tasked to make [her] life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of [her] most elevated and critical hour.

These are the thoughts which the Advent season raises up in me. Am I ready? For as author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes in an Advent sermon, "The good news is always beginning somewhere in the world, for those with ears to hear and hearts to go wherever the way may lead."

Am I ready for the good news of Life? Am I ready to live and love and savor this very moment, this day and time in my life, knowing that it contains all that is most precious to me, that it contains all that "is, and was, and yet shall be"? Am I ready to extend this conviction to others and to myself, to give them and me the benefit of the doubt, to assume the best and to hope for the best and to act for the best? Will I be ready when the sacred bursts through my ordinary life, in this season or in any other season of the year? Will I be awake, will I be paying attention, will I not let the moment slip away unnoticed and unappreciated and unlived? Am I ready? Are you?

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock