December 5, 2021 (2nd Sunday of Advent)
/“A Spiritual Infrastructure Proposal”
by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.
[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]
Are you impressed with the list of dignitaries: the emperor Tiberius Caesar, the governor Pontius Pilate, King Herod and his fellow tetrarchs Philip and Lysanias, and the high priests Annas and Caiaphas? I’m not sure God was impressed, because in the midst of this grand and complicated hierarchy, the word of God came, not to them, but to wild-eyed, title-less John in the desert.
What is that word of God? The same word, more or less, as the word given to the prophet Isaiah, also cried out in the desert: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Fill in the valleys, level the high places, make the roads straight and smooth. In other words, John is preaching the mother of all infrastructure bills.
What sort of infrastructure work needs to be done in your life? If you’re wondering if you can make it to the end of the finals week road, is there anything you can do to pave the way to peace? If you’re experiencing an avalanche of demands, what do you need to clear from the road? If your road has some potholes of despair, how can hope smooth the way? If you’re caught in a traffic jam of resentment, can you create a toll-free forgiveness lane? If you find yourself on the rough road of self-reliance, can you build a carpool lane with God and others?
Advent is a time to begin, with God’s grace, major infrastructure projects. John the Baptism preached a baptism of repentance. That’s repent, not repaint. We don’t want to keep covering up the structural cracks in our life with another coat of paint when we need new structures.
Why not invest 1-2% of our day in prayer, 15-30 minutes? And prayer is, after all, mostly about letting God do the work. We can let God heal the pathways of our hearts. Prayer is also a rest stop along the way. Yes, a place to recharge the batteries of our electric cars, but even more basically a time to really live instead of anxiously travel, a time to take in the view, a time to just be with God.
What sort of infrastructure work needs to be done in our Catholic Community at Stanford? Why do so many of our members hesitate to be part of one of our Encounter Christ Small Groups or to step forward to help with our worship? Are there onramps to engagement that we can build together so that more people feel a sense of real belonging and ownership?
Some of our permanent community members don’t feel like full members, saying to themselves: Oh, I guess he’s just asking students to help with Mass. Some students walk into this beautiful building and see themselves as only tourists, or maybe they feel swallowed up by its size, feeling tiny because they are alone. They say to themselves: She couldn’t be talking to me when she asks for help with Mass.
What bridges can we build between students and permanent community members, between those who tend to look toward innovation and those who favor the familiar, between those inside MemChu and those outside? “The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” All flesh. Everyone is invited to the table of God’s glory.
Can our community build an infrastructure for all? We have this new tool called synodality. Really, it’s a traditional tool, sharpened, renamed, and rebranded. Synodality is literally journeying together, but it’s also building together the road for that journey, building the infrastructure of communal living by listening, speaking up, and discerning together, discerning the path of the Spirit. Read today’s handout about our community’s synodal plan, which begins over the holidays with each of us initiating conversations with family and friends.
Synodality is a tool for building our global Church’s infrastructure as well. Synodality can help us build structures of accountability and participation, bridges to overcome division. Might synodality, as we Catholics hone this tool of listening and discerning, also become a tool for the renewal and development of our nation’s infrastructure? Can synodality help us create structures that share God’s bounty, structures of anti-racism, and structures of inclusion and participation? Can synodality, this journeying together, help us build bridges across political divides?
John the Baptist calls us to repentance. The Greek here is metanoia, a change of mind, a new way of thinking. Think different, as the old Apple slogan said. But this change in thinking leads to a fundamental change in living. Metanoia is a conversion, a reformation. Sounds like infrastructure work.
But metanoia is also often thought of as a turning around, a change in direction. The road ahead may be rough or blocked by an avalanche, but sometimes, instead of fixing the road, we might simply need to turn around. It’s like when we insist on following our GPS even when it’s taking us onto an unfinished bridge.
Instead, we can follow our moral compass and turn around, journeying, not to what we perceive as the center of life and activity, with the emperors, governors, and tetrarchs, but to what we perceive as the margins, where we meet the people who are at the center of God’s attention. There, we discover that we don’t need any roads to God or God to us. God is already, always present. There, at the true center of things, all flesh shall see God’s glory.
