Reading Francis

In Luke 21 (which is the Gospel for the first week of Advent this year), Jesus warns his followers about a final judgment day, saying, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.”

Of course, there are lots of warnings like this in the New Testament, both through direct statements and through parables. This one has always stuck out for me, though, because of the odd pairing; “becoming drowsy from carousing and drunkenness” seems like the polar opposite of “the anxieties of daily life.” It’s like both the grasshopper and the ant get caught up in this; for those less inclined to Aesop’s fables, the party animal and the obsessive straight A student are grouped together here. Whether you love to party or get lost in the daily grind, Jesus seems to say, you are losing the plot.

I used to focus more attention on the “anxieties of daily life” part of this. That may reflect my personal foibles, or maybe it’s because our society considers reckless frivolity a moral danger, while celebrating those who hustle to get every detail right. Getting caught up in a party life eventually leads to an intervention, while getting caught up in Type A behavior usually gets you a promotion, so that caution against the daily grind seems more countercultural.

I’ve slowly come to realize that these really are two sides of the same coin. Whichever of these excesses you’re more susceptible to, the problem in this context is that it tempts you to take your eye off the ball and forget the things that are really important. If I am locked into the cage of worries over how I will make it through the day/week/month, I may be putting the spotlight on things that will seem trivial a year from now and could be forgotten a lifetime from now. If, instead, I throw up my hands and say, “It just doesn’t matter. Let’s party,” I am trading the big picture for the pleasures of the moment. 

Either approach is a distraction from spending the time I have on what really matters, which is always love. We know the stories of those whose carefree lifestyles hurt those they love, and we know the stories of those who let their work make them absentee parents, spouses and friends. Both cases are tragedies.

I think I’ve written before about how, when a baby is born or a hurricane is bearing down or an awful diagnosis comes in or a bride and groom meet at the altar or a close family member passes away, we seem to live in a different relationship to time. I think the Greeks talked about chronos as the day-to-day time and kairos as those moments outside of the flow that are brimming with incredible meaning. When I’ve been thrust into those kairos moments, I’ve often marveled that the rest of the world can keep rolling along, like it’s any other Tuesday, while my world screeches to a halt. The reverse is true, too; not often enough, I’ve stopped to consider how the people I encounter may be smack dab in the middle of their own kairos moments, unbeknownst to me.

Luke’s Jesus says in this passage that the last day will snap you up like a trap, totally by surprise. Such is my experience of those kairos moments. But religions that build around a liturgical calendar engineer times that invite us to enter into kairos time on purpose, because that different type of time isn’t only for surprises, disastrous or glorious; it’s for regrounding in the deeply meaningful and real.

Advent is such a season for Catholics. And, look, between getting over Thanksgiving and Black Friday, putting up Christmas decorations, and wrapping up the end of the year, the carousing and anxieties of chronos time really double down about now; I get it. 

Usually, though, the most rewarding moments come after the toughest resistance and the strongest temptations to give in. So if that’s where you are, whether it’s the carousing or the anxieties that are drawing you back into the grind, my prayer is that we can together shake them off and pay attention to the meaningful moments that are here in our midst this season.