Third Sunday of Advent

A view from I-69
in Northern Indiana
during light snow. 

See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
being patient with it
until it receives the early and the late rains.
You too must be patient.

On this Gaudete Sunday, Saint James takes a common image from work when he speaks of patience. Whether you are a farmer of the first century, or a technician of the 21^st century, you know about patience.

      There is patience with oneself as you learn, make mistakes, and master a skill. Nowadays they call that a “learning curve.”

      There is patience with others as we learn not everyone thinks, feels or acts the way I do. Learning to respect the differences among human beings bears fruit in patience.

      And there is the patience of waiting for processes to develop, whether they be planted seeds or pies in the oven or economic tides of recession and prosperity.

The wise farmer knows the seasons. His work and his readiness to work are tuned to the cycles of winter, spring, summer and fall. In the spring he is eager to plant; in the summer he harrows; and in the fall he reaps. Each season has its own eagerness, joyousness and satisfaction as his work revolves. He does not prefer one over the other for they are all one.

An economy based not on food production but upon the flow of capital, cannot so readily appreciate the cycle of seasons. But there are still traces of that “seasoning” in our society. You can eat tomatoes year round but the only season for vine-ripened tomatoes is the high summer. Corn on the cob is a summer treat. The United States has seasonal sports: football in the fall and baseball in the spring, although baseball lingers into late fall, and football into late winter.

There are seasons in our lives and the Holy Spirit teaches us how to pay attention to them. The wise man Qoheleth said, “There is a time for everything.” Wisdom teaches us to wait for the time and to act in timely fashion.

The Catholic Church promotes Natural Family Planning as a way to honor the seasons of a woman’s body, which are so closely integrated with her moods and feelings and her very self. To ignore the cycles of her body is to ignore her. To many people NFP sounds like a weird way of life, an unnecessary sacrifice.

But the earth and its seasons have their own gravity, drawing ever downwards and into common sense. We can soar into the stratosphere with notions about how life should be, and we can spend enormous energy building castles in the sky and houses on sandy soil; but the Earth still pulls us back to reality. We can ignore the costs of waste and consumerism for this generation and another generation but the consequences of our waste will come due as surely as the winter solstice and the vernal equinox.

Christmas, with its winter imagery, invites us back into the seasonal cycles. They pull on us like gravity. The discontented, disconnected sophomore (of any age) asks why? and why not? and finds no satisfactory answer. He wants Christmas all year round, and despises the answer, “It’s not the time!”

In today’s gospel Jesus assures Saint John the Baptist, “The time has come.”

…the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.

On this Gaudete Sunday we praise God for desolation is ending; our salvation is nearer than when we first heard the good news.