Reading Francis

We have a snake in our backyard. He’s a 2-3 foot black racer, and he likes to hang out on the rocks by our garden hoses, so I call him Rocky. I had a pet grass snake for a little while when I was young, so I don’t mind Rocky.

April is another story. I’ve only really heard her scream in terror at two things: snakes, and when she opened an oversized AARP card that someone got her on her 50th birthday (and, to be clear, it wasn’t me).

My sense is that she inherited the anti-snake thing, not only from her mom, but from, well, Eve in Genesis 3:15 (when God tells the serpent “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.”)

Rocky comes to mind, not only because the Genesis 3:15 passage is in today’s Mass readings (for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, maybe the most Catholic feast day), but because yesterday’s Second Sunday of Advent reading from Isaiah 11 includes a couple of snake references. This reading also came up the previous Tuesday, which is kind of like highlighting AND underlining it in the textbook. Here’s the part about what hope and peace look like, Biblically:

Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

the calf and the young lion shall browse together,

with a little child to guide them.

The cow and the bear shall be neighbors,

together their young shall rest;

the lion shall eat hay like the ox.

The baby shall play by the cobra’s den,

and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.

There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD,

as water covers the sea.

Setting aside the “toddlers playing with snakes” part of this, what strikes me is the sheer impracticality of this hope. (Which I’m sure was not Isaiah’s point.) I mean, I saw “The Lion King” enough times to know about the circle of life. If the leopard and lion and bear become vegetarians, wouldn’t that completely screw up the ecological balance that David Attenborough documentaries are always fretting about? That’s like, totally impractical.

And so it goes, when you think about peace and hope in our world today. On Pope Leo’s flight from Turkiye (did I get that right?) to Lebanon, he reinforced the Vatican’s longstanding support of a two-state solution in the Holy Land as the only real path to peace, and he hoped publicly to celebrate the Jubilee of 2033 (two millennia after Jesus’ death and resurrection) in Jerusalem. But if the last two years have done anything, surely it has been to dig the trenches that much deeper between Palestinians and Israelis. How could a peaceful coexistence possibly be practical?

Or look closer to home. How can we even begin to hope for an economic system that fosters a reasonable hope for security for middle class families, when the only policy choices on the menu seem to either favor AI-bubble-fueled billionaires and private equity firms with no stake in the common good or champion big-government bureaucracy? How do we imagine peace in a country where a growing number of people don’t see the American idea as a cause big enough to bridge our differences? Again, the sheer impracticality of hope and peace.

There are perhaps three counterarguments to the impracticality of hope and peace. The first, and maybe the most common, isn’t really an argument. It’s just the claim that “God’s ways are not our ways”, a sort of doubling down on the idea that a God that becomes one of us as a laborer-turned-preacher-in-backwater-Capernaum shouldn’t really be expected to hew to our standards of practicality. Perhaps true, but not consoling to the Gen Xers and other cynics in the room.

Another way is to pull the lens of history back a bit. Human civilizations seem to run in cycles. We’ve been in similar and worse hot water before. Remembering that we got through the seemingly unresolvable challenges of decades and centuries (and, if you pull the lens way back, millennia) ago should give us some caution that our current mess is so impossible.

But a third way is to go in the other direction, by focusing not on the big picture, but on the hope and peace we find (and make) in our little corners of the world. In his remarks to the public yesterday, Pope Leo cited these readings and made this point:

Sisters and brothers, how much the world needs this hope!  Nothing is impossible to God.  Let us prepare ourselves for his Kingdom, let us welcome it.  The little child, Jesus of Nazareth, will lead us!  He who placed himself in our hands, from the night of his birth to the dark hour of his death on the cross, shines upon our history as the rising Sun.  A new day has begun: let us arise and walk in his light!

This is the spirituality of Advent, very luminous and concrete.  The streetlights remind us that each of us can be a little light, if we welcome Jesus, the shoot of a new world.  Let us learn how to do this from Mary, our Mother, a woman of hope who remains faithful in waiting.

Be a streetlight, to steal from Ted Lasso. 

And if you think about it, there are examples all around us. I think of Homeboy Industries, and their decades-long ability to get warring gang members in LA to work together and eventually build barrier-breaking friendships with each other, which is at least as impractical as lions and lambs hanging out.

Or maybe it looks like someone going through a disorienting and devastating medical crisis, but finding “angels all around them” in hospital staff and strangers on the street who give them just enough encouragement to keep going.

Or maybe it looks like the small businesses that make decisions, not based on maximizing profit but on taking care of their customers, workers and communities.

Or maybe, taking a lesson from the rest of the mass readings from the Second Sunday of Advent (not only Isaiah 11:1-10, but Psalm 72, Romans 15, and Matthew 3), streetlight-level hope and peace looks like the welcoming of the outsider. Isaiah says this new peace will draw all the nations. Psalm 72 says it will bless all the tribes of the earth. Paul tells the Romans how the Gentiles have now been invited into the circle, and John the Baptist rails at the religious leaders for trying to keep the outsiders out.

So be a streetlight. Find a way to see the sibling beneath the person you can’t stand. Be an angel in disguise to the stranger or acquaintance, because you never know when they might need one. Celebrate when you see people, groups or institutions welcoming in the outcast. 

In our own small ways, we can show the practicality of our tiny, streetlight-beam slivers of hope and peace.