First Tuesday of Advent - December 4, 2018

Beginning . . . Again

Isaiah 11:1-10
Luke 10:21-24


Isaiah's prophecy looks to a time when a "root will come up from the stump" of Jesse (King David's lineage) . . . "from his roots a Branch will bear fruit."

In something that looks final (a stump), something new will begin to appear.

Something small and hidden (roots) will be the beginning of fruit-bearing.

In Luke 10:21, the revelation is entrusted to children, to the unsophisticated, not to the learned. We all have to begin as children, in other words.

Today's readings make clear a basic spiritual truth: The first step of the spiritual life is to begin, and to begin where you are, not where you would like to be or where you have been in the past.

Begin here, not there.

Begin now, not then.

Don't ever think of yourself as so advanced that you have no need to begin right here, right now. I've heard too many people through the years say, "I can't begin now . . . I'll begin when _______."

The only place from which you can begin is here. Now.

When a Benedictine monk was asked by a visitor what the monks did all day at the monastery, he replied, "We fall down and get up. Fall down and get up. Fall down and get up" (hence the title of John McQuiston's book on Benedictine spirituality, Always We Begin Again).

About the spiritual life, Thomas Merton wrote this: "One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself (sic) as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything. . . . We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!" (Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, pp. 36-37)


For Reflection:

1. Spend some time reflecting on what it means for you to be a beginner. How does that feel to you? What does it raise up within you? What part of you resists being a beginner? Sit with this as non-judgmentally as you can.

2. Take one of the quotes above (the Benedictine monk or the Merton quote) and sit with it. In whichever quote you choose, notice what ideas or lines speak to you. Also notice which ideas you resist. Bring both that which draws you and that which you resist into your prayer today.