The
Greatest of All Illusions: Wake Up! The Greatest of
All Illusions: Wake Up! The Greatest of All
Illusions: Wake Up!

The Greatest of All Illusions: Wake Up!

My parents celebrate their Diamond Wedding anniversary this weekend.  It doesn’t seem five minutes since I flew home from Rome for their Silver Wedding celebrations in December 1990.  Just 14 months before that, on a warm early October afternoon in 1989, a scouse priest called Monsignor Vincent Nichols (some of you may have heard of him) asked if I had a spare pair of trainers and invited me to join him and Dave McCormack (a Portsmouth seminarian mate of mine) on a run through Trastevere and across the Janiculum, which is a hill on the west of Rome.  The “Gianicolo” (as the Romans call it) offers a famously breathtaking panoramic view of the city and seeing it for the first time that day was the moment I think I first fell in love with the Eternal City.  In the almost four decades since, I have always found it easier to reflect and pray on that hill than anywhere else in that city.  It seems easier to locate yourself in a much wider narrative when you see ancient, medieval, modern and postmodern Rome before you.  There is an old saying in Christian spirituality: “God is the same everywhere, but we are not!”  When we pray, we don’t make God present to us.  God is present everywhere.  We pray to tune in, to make ourselves present to God.  God is no more or less present on the Janiculum Hill than in a pub - it’s just that I am usually more present to God on the Janiculum than in a pub.  The problem of presence or absence - awareness or lack of awareness - is not with God, but with me.

I think that this is also so often the case for the presence of the goodness of my life.  For the past 8 years, a combination of infection, punctured cornea and post-corneal transplant cataract has reduced my right eye to zero vision. Expert care from wonderful professionals has helped, though I still can’t see anything out of it (but there is still vision potential on the retina, so any spare prayers or well wishes if you do that sort of thing would be appreciated). The human body is a marvellously resourceful little creation and I have readjusted a little, but never again will I have anything other than a sense of awe and utter gratitude for the miraculousness of my one remaining eye, which somehow “sees!”  I am more present to the gift of sight than ever!  G.K. Chesterton once said that the way to love and appreciate anything is to realise that it might be lost. He said, “Familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.” As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. The moment we start to become over-familiar with someone or something, such as our eyesight (or our insides before we got colon cancer) or our Diamond Wedding-celebrating parents, we are in danger of taking them for granted. Chesterton used to say that we must “Learn to look at things that are familiar, until they look unfamiliar again.”  In other words, find what or whom it is that you take for granted in life and stop doing it!  It’s all a gift, all on loan, and only for a while.

This is why Jesus says in the gospel at Mass this Sunday, the 1st Sunday of Advent: “Stay awake!” Wake up!  Don’t fall asleep to the richness of your life and the people in it! It could all be taken at a time we do not expect.  We don’t want it to be a heart attack, a stroke, cancer or death, either to ourselves or to someone we love, that wakes us up to the preciousness of our life!  Wake up to it now!  As we begin Advent, it is a good season to remind ourselves what matters and who matters in our lives. It can be a good time to make a conscious decision to start seriously thinking about the meaning of stuff - what we are pursuing each day, where we are heading in this world and where we think we are ultimately heading when we leave this world.  Jesus says in Sunday’s gospel that so many people just carry on with business as usual: eating, drinking, taking husbands and wives, working the fields, or the millstone (or teaching, preaching, doing the financial sector, whatever our work is). Then bang, the Master arrives!  Death comes.  So stay awake, because we don’t know the hour that will happen.

In Advent, the readings at Mass are sometimes about the end of the world. Our real worry should not be, however, that the world might suddenly end or that we might unexpectedly die, but that we might live our life in this world asleep and then die having been asleep at the wheel of our existence - that is, without ever having realised that life is about love and without properly expressing our love.  We can die consumed by the busy pressures of living, of grinding at the mill, ploughing the field, being in the loop, having all the gossip, chasing the dream. We never quite got around to fully living. Of course, we have to do these things because they are the bits and pieces of daily life.  But Advent challenges us to wake up and remain awake, vigilant to the fact that all of these bits and pieces have an ultimate purpose -  the purpose of love, of making the world a better place.  That’s what Isaiah means in the first reading this Sunday when he says all the nations flow to the Temple of the Lord - all the little streams that constitute our lives are meant to flow towards serving God’s purposes of love.  Paul says in the 2nd reading this Sunday that we must wake up NOW. That means having love, truth, and reality as our chief concerns.  It means making sure we thank the people in our lives, appreciate them, affirm them, forgive them, apologise to them, laugh with them and cry with them, join their anniversary celebrations, and tell those we love that we love them while we still have time together.  These things lead to a simple and joyful life, no matter how complicated the bits and pieces of the daily grind are.

The illusion of familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.  It’s all a miraculous gift, given for a while.  Wake up, Paul Rowan!