Reflection for 1st Sunday of Advent 1st December 2024

Imagine being able to stop time: to actually suspend events and decisions, step out of the moment, and look ahead to see how things might work out.

It is the kind of control we dream of having.

In Mitch Albom’s book The Time Keeper, two characters are given that opportunity: a very wealthy businessman who tries to cheat death and a teenage girl who has been the victim of cruel cyber bullying.   Both have made the decision to end their lives; by doing so, they believe that can take control of their lives with no consequences on others. But with the help of the mysterious “time keeper” in Albom’s parable, they are able to stop time an instant before the climactic moment. The “time keeper” enables the old man and the seventeen-year-old to step out of the scene and look ahead to see not only the hurt they will cause others but the opportunities for doing good in their lives that each would miss by their trying to short-circuit time. When they return to the moment, they make different decisions.

Both the dying billionaire and the desperate teenager realize that control over time is more a curse than a blessing; that having more time does not make our lives better or more fulfilling; that while we cannot own time or control it, we can change and transform our lives in the course of God’s time.

This First Sunday of Advent confronts us with the limits of time and the preciousness of our lives. Advent teaches us not to seek to control time but to embrace the flow of God’s time, to realize that time is not an obstacle to be mastered but a gift to be cherished. These first four weeks of the liturgical year point to the reality that our lives are measured in a fixed, finite period of days, months and years that are not to be squandered on temporary and passing things. In Advent we learn the spirituality of waiting and the holiness of patience; the spirit of Advent waiting enables us to hope, to behold God in every moment we live, to realize the possibilities we have to make things better and complete in the span of time God gives us – time that we can measure but never control.