Signs of hope

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005 by Jack Costello

Back in November 1959, when Advent sprang on me unawares more or less for the first time, I was just finishing my first three months as a Jesuit novice in Guelph. The 27 of us who had just made the 30day Spiritual Exercises were still feeling something between relief that the retreat was over and quiet conviction that we were ready to take up what we saw as Francis Xavier's personal vocation to convert the whole world. Nothing would have been too much for us.

But that Advent, the first one where I followed the readings for Mass and also the Office of the Hours, a major wrinkle crept into the smooth blanket of my missionary hopes. The concentration on key Advent words was wonderful: longing, waiting, joy and especially hope. They settled in and revealed a lot about what was present or missing in my own heart. And Advent still does this fresh hit even now.

It was the "conversion of the people" that gave me my problems. It was the total absence. of any sign that I could see of leopards and cows, lions and lambs, adders and children hanging out on street corners in open affection for one another. I was actually overwhelmed by the feeling that here was in this great place praying and working away with three-square meals every day (to say of first-class feasts!) but the World wasn't really changing! Every Advent I'd be coming back to this same talk of yearning, waiting for a coming that fills us with joy but in my society I could see all the same sins and evils Israel saw in itself, alive and well in 1959.

I began thinking: is this some kind of bad joke? Or mental, ritual gymnastics we go through to hide from the fact that the world was as unconverted and messed up as it ever was. That, along with the 30-day retreat, was when I came to know praying was a really serious business. It was not pious at all. It was about getting real.

More than 45 years have gone by and more wrinkles in the social and cosmic cloth have appeared, to say nothing of the cloth of my own life. But so too, has the full stretch of the cloth of history and God's grace opened up for me. Christian hope, as I now see it, tells the truth about what is but also includes in "what is" the way things can and should be. Visualizing rich and true "alternatives" is built into being real as a Christian--and as a human being.

One of the recent hits of real hope given to us by the Spirit was the now-famous talk of Arundhati Roy at the end of the third World Social Forum. She ended her critique of the damage corporate capitalism was doing in India and the rest of the world proclaiming: "The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they am selling in their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons and their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

On the heels of that, we have the new quiet revolutions of our time: the care for women, water, Kyoto and Stephen Lewis' prophetic call to care for those living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. I am thinking also of Tikkun magazine's Campaign of Spiritual Progressives supporting the "Buy Nothing Day" movement, and their plea for a conversion of our holiday gift-giving to something entirely non-commercial, personal and simple. Hope is alive and walking in the dangerous streets.

We tend to look for God's coming as a coming in glory, in the form of a rose. But God's actual coming in Jesus showed God preferring to come as a dandelion pushing up through cracks in the "system's" sidewalks-saucy and unstoppable.

As the old folk song, written so soon after 1959, said: "When will we ever learn ..."

Jack Costello is the director of the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice.