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Chapter 40 of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah contains some of the most beautiful passages in Scripture. These prophecies are not just meant for the time of Jerusalem. They are eternal; they are meant for now.
So please, once more, let us risk looking in the mirror and seeing who we really are. And in so doing, let us realize that we are wonderful in the sight of God, that he loves us so much he has sent his own Son to redeem us.
Advent is the season in which we remember this anniversary of his coming. It is a time for us to understand what we are truly worth.
First, Isaiah tells us to be consoled; he also explains to us that all our sins are forgiven. And then comes another verse, saying, Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord.
We know that our hearts and minds are often a “wilderness” where we are trapped. We try to go here, there, and everywhere in this chaotic, uneven inwardness. And we seem to get nowhere.
Let every valley be filled in. How many valleys have we got? How many dark and strange places in our minds and souls, places in which we hide? All because we don’t want to face what we know we should: the Law of the Lord.
Let every mountain and hill be laid low. We have mountains. Not the mountain of the Lord but others—mountains of all kinds of pleasures, all kinds of desires. They have to be laid low.
Let every cliff become a plain, and the ridges, a valley. Now, if we were in the Holy Land, we’d see the physical topography—the strange hills, mountains, ridges and so forth—of that land. But in this passage, the prophet is not describing these geographical formations; in symbols, he is describing us. Yes, us!
We have a real situation in our inner landscape that we have to face. We have to repent, that’s what it really means. Repentance isn’t simply apologizing, then going to confession and being forgiven. Oh no! Repentance is much more than that. Repentance is a turning around.
It is an ongoing affair. To understand that which we know we must do, and then to really do it. That is repentance.
To put it another way: repentance is the incarnation of the Gospel in our life. Yes, we acknowledge that we have sinned before the Lord. Yes, we acknowledge that we have trodden the wrong path.
Now we must turn our back to all of that, and move in the opposite direction. Otherwise, in a little while we will be telling the same sins all over again—to another priest, or to the same priest—asking to be forgiven again.
Repentance means change. In a sense, it becomes a bulldozer that we apply to our minds and souls to level the ridges, flatten down the mountains, fill in the potholes and ravines, so as to make a path for the Lord to cross the desert of our heart.
We need to pray to the Lord for this bulldozer so that the rockfall and debris can be pushed away.
God will do this for us, provided we stop the swirling dust of our own mutterings, the constant use of the pronoun ‘I’, our continual thinking that we are always right and someone else is wrong, our non-listening to our own brothers and sisters or to our spouse and children.
The weight of listening, really listening to others, is heavy. That is why we need to pray for a spiritual bulldozer to make straight the ways of the Lord in our own heart.
Then God himself might walk these paths, unencumbered. He can come into our hearts and do the listening there. He can listen to others through us, talk through us, understand through us, help through us. He can console others through us.
If the paths of our hearts were made straight, he would come running! He wants to be with us until the end of time, as he said in the Gospel, and he still desires to serve. And what better service could there be than to have the listening ear of God within our hearts?
It is time for us to pray, dearly beloved, so that we may be able to listen to the hunger of others. Usually, other people don’t want us to do too much for them. They simply want us to listen because listening means love and friendship, for which there is such a great hunger today.
Yes, to repent is to change. It is not just to acknowledge that we have done wrong. It is to turn our back to the wrong, and start doing the right—incarnating the Gospel. Christianity in the world today hinges on this living the Gospel.
The world today doesn’t believe that Christ’s teachings are of any value, because the majority of Christians do not incarnate them.
Take, for example, Reverend Martin Luther King. He “had a dream.” He incarnated that dream, and he was killed because of it. He did the very thing that people expect a Christian to do: he incarnated his beliefs. Do we?
Make straight the path of the Lord, a highway for our God across the desert. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low. Let every cliff become a plain and the ridges a valley. Then the glory of our Lord shall be revealed (Is 40:3-5).
This glory can be revealed in each one of us. How? It’s very simple, in a sense. All we need do is just to stop our personality clashes, our judgmentalism toward one another, our mistrust of one another, our anger against one another, our hostility against one another.
All we need do is to begin to love one another as Christ loved us. Then like the pagans of ancient Rome, the pagans of today will say: “Well now, look at those Christians, will you? They’ve really got something. See how they love one another!”
In the first chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, we read about St. John the Baptist preparing the way for the Lord.
Every fresh coming of Christ into the world has followed the work of those who, in the spirit and in their lives, have been road-makers. Christ needs preparers of his way. We prepare the way of Christ whenever we give him leverage in our life, a place in our life, in all of our life.
A receptive mind is an indispensable road-making tool. We make Christ’s path straight whenever we bring his word to a world that is dying for lack of it.
We go before his face and we make ready for him whenever we help to remove the things which block his entrance into our world: greed, pride, hatred, personality clashes, divisions among us. Nothing less than repentance can lead the world out of disaster today.
People must be set in a new direction, turning away from their fatal scramble for power, prestige, advantage.
In the forefront of John’s call for repentance was his sense of the coming judgment. In our days, too, we can sense and feel it. Repent!
Repentance is more than penitence. It is not remorse. It is not admitting mistakes. It is not saying in condemnation, “I’ve been a fool.” Who of us has not recited such a dismal litany?
All of us have. They are common and easy to recite. Repentance is more. It is even more than being sorry for one’s sins. It is a moral and spiritual revolution.
To repent is one of the hardest things in the world; yet it is basic to all spiritual progress. It calls for a complete breakdown of our prideful self-assurance, a stripping away of the cloak of prestige that is woven from our petty successes, a breaching of the innermost citadel of our self-will.
Adapted from Donkey Bells, (2000), pp.17-21, available from MH Publications
