Awake to Grace
First Sunday of Advent. Fr John O’Connor shows how the virtues enable us to be alert to God and to one another.
Terence Malick’s celebrated film The Tree of Life tells the story of the O’Brien family in Waco, Texas. The father, played by Brad Pitt, is a disappointed man who also symbolises the perspective of nature: he assesses his life within the terms of ‘the world’, finds it wanting, and lives in a perpetual state of resentment and disappointment. The mother symbolises the order of grace: she sees beauty in things (soap bubbles, a sunset, the wind shaking the leaves) and allows love to touch even her pain.
Then there is the voiceover in the film that helps explain the meaning the film wishes to express:
‘Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Gets others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things.’
Dominicans like me might well chime in at this point that Malick’s characterisation of nature is too negative, and by quoting St Thomas Aquinas that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, that there is not a fundamental disunity between the two orders of grace and nature. Fair enough. But, even so, Malick is correct that there can sometimes be tensions between the two, tensions we see all the time.
In this Sunday’s rather apocalyptic Gospel reading we have Jesus say the following:
But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.
In the terms of this passage, the mother in The Tree of Life is awake – she is ready: her vision is alive to the presence of God in all things and at every instant; the father, however, is not awake – in his case: excessive focus on the cares of this world.
Now, to speak of types of people brings out what I think is an important point within Jesus’s message. When we speak of being awake, it is easy to think of it in a rather narrow way, like diligent sentries on guard late at night. But I think there is more going on: that Jesus is speaking about a general state of spiritual and moral wakefulness that involves being a certain kind of person.
For a start, I do not think to myself when I hear Jesus’s words about not being weighed down by dissipation and drunkenness in case that day comes upon us like a trap, that the take home message is: Let’s hope the time or events of which Jesus speaks does not take place on New Year’s Eve, when many people will have had a glass or two of port.
Jesus’s words are also not a prescription for constant anxiety. Indeed, they caution us about being weighed down by the cares of this life. We can lead normal lives. But we can do so whilst being awake in the sense that Jesus means.
One way to think about being awake by being a certain kind of person is in terms of the virtues. Sometimes the virtues are presented in high-minded, killjoy, and off-putting ways, as though they are only for a lofty moral and spiritual elite. But they are much better understood as those personal qualities we all need to live life well, to enable flourishing, and to become human beings who are awake to what really matters.
Take virtues like temperateness, justice, and generosity. The temperate person can enjoy themselves (a lot) and have (a lot of) fun. Indeed, the temperate person can enjoy themselves all the more because of, and not despite, the fact that they know when to say yes and when to say no. The intemperate greedy person without appropriate self-discipline is too busy thinking about their next luxury that they fail to enjoy the good things they have right now. The temperate person is awake to what is appropriate to a given situation and gets things right.
The just person is awake to giving others and themselves their due. This helps enables them to treat others well, and to take care of both our world and of themselves. The generous person is awake regarding when to give and when not to give. (A sign of a truly generous person is that they don’t give when it is inappropriate to give, but that they do give when it is appropriate.)
And then there are the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity – states of being awake that are directed to what is beyond our human capacities because they are directed to friendship with God.
But notice what is going on here in terms of the ways of nature and of grace. This Sunday’s Gospel reading speaks of when nature goes wrong (‘dissipation and drunkenness and [excessive focus on the] cares of this life’). But it also speaks of when we get nature right, by being awake. And when we get nature right, the ways of the grace of God can be active within nature. Indeed, notice that an indication of being awake in the sense of Jesus’s words is that there is prayer. Nature and grace can sometimes pull in different directions; but, when we get it right, we open nature to being perfected by the grace of God.
Behind Jesus’s words of two thousand years ago are predictions about momentous future events. But I think Jesus’s words also speak about a certain kind of general wakefulness that is of great importance no matter what age we happen to be in. For Jesus’s words are also about the importance of becoming a certain kind of person, people who are awake to what really matters. This involves acquiring, and being open to, virtuous qualities that enhance what we are as human beings. By speaking about the kinds of people we should become, Jesus’s words are about our lives as a whole.
Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16 | 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2 | Luke 21:25-28,34-36
Image: detail from the mosaic of the Tree of Life at San Clemente, Rome, photograhed by Rita1234, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
