11/29/15
Today is the first day
of Advent. With “Advent” meaning, “He is coming.” The Lord comes to us.
We like to restrict
Advent to preparing us for the Lord’s coming to us on Christmas, but the Church
does not oblige us there. No, she gives us a wide range of readings that deal
with the Lord coming to us in many different ways.
He came into the world
back in the year One. He will come in power and glory at the end of the world.
In our Mass today he will come to us. On the last day of life he will come to each
of us individually.
But, let me speak of a
quite different way of his coming to us.
Thirty years ago there
was a Rabbi Lebowitz who taught a popular course in primitive religions at J.U.
With his setting off on a Sabbatical, someone came up with my name for
replacing him teaching the course. They sent me the books they used for the
course, and I dug into them, but my name didn’t draw students enough for them
to hold the course.
In the books they sent
me there was one fact that surprised me: almost every primitive people had
something like the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden apple. In each
place they did something that drove their god away. In Africa, the Lozi people
of Zambia said their god ran away on seeing our wickedness. The Pangwa of
Tanzania said their god made us out of ant excrement, and fled from the smell.
The Yoruba people of Nigeria said their god was drunk on palm wine when he made
us. (They put offerings of palm wine on their god’s altar, and our Catholics
sometime stole it.)
Peoples on six
continents share the idea of their god fleeing from them after he created them,
but what I found more surprising was that many primitive people, thinking of
how their god showered them with blessings at creation time, got the idea that
if they could trick their god into thinking creation-time had returned they
could get their god to return. For that they would portray their creation myth
in colorful dances. (Pictures of those weirdly costumed dances used to grace
the pages of “National Geographic.”)
The most common
holiday throughout the world is New Years. In country after country that has
been the day they celebrated creation to entice their god to return. (They
celebrated the chaos that preceded creation on New Year’s Eve.)
There is one Bible
story that separated the Israelites from those people who believed their god
had altogether deserted them. That story is Jacob’s dream when he saw an
endless string of angels going up and down a ladder to God, bringing our
prayers up to God.
The Gospel in our New Testament readings ask God when will he return.Out first and second readings ask God hen will he return, an warn us to be watcbful1
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