At Home on Earth | Kyle Kramer

Kyle Kramer

Kyle is the executive director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and social compassion.

He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the US Conference of Catholic Bishopssponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is the author of Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living (Franciscan Media, 2021). He speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality.

He and his family spent 15 years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana.

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The Challenge of Waiting

One of my favorite lines of Scripture is Isaiah chapter 43, verse 19: “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the wilderness I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.” I’ve returned to this verse at various times in my life, usually when I have been either going through a personal transition or discerning one.

Advent is the time when we anticipate the new thing God brings into the world through the incarnation of Christ in the baby Jesus. It’s also a special time for us to discern what new thing God may be bringing into our own lives, in our own time—how Christ is born in us.

THE CHALLENGES OF BIRTH

For my part, a new thing feels long overdue. I dream of the world that Pope Francis described in “Laudato Si’”: a world of “integral ecology,” a world where we live more in harmony with each other and the rest of the natural world—not only so that God’s will be done on Earth as it is in heaven, but also for the blunt fact that our survival as a species depends on it.

In fits, starts, and glimpses, I feel as if I’m beginning to perceive how God is making a way through our present wilderness. Something new definitely wants and needs to be born.

But birth is rarely easy. I haven’t gone through the pain of labor and childbirth, but I’ve been at my wife’s side as she has brought our three children into the world. I always wondered whether I’d be tough enough to do what she managed to do.

If human birth is so difficult and fraught with peril and uncertainty, how can we possibly expect that the birth of new social, economic, and environmental relationships would be easy? The early Christians, experiencing persecution and martyrdom, certainly didn’t delude themselves this way.

So if our faith calls us to a new thing and that it indeed is springing forth, and if new births are filled with challenge, how do we help to midwife this challenging birth?

MARY, OUR TEACHER

Mary is one of the best guides we have through this journey of new birth. Mary’s journey toward Jesus’ birth began with her fiat, her willingness to say yes to the plan and promise of God. Like Mary, our own faithfulness to God’s new thing means saying our own trusting yes, aligning ourselves with the divine will, even in the midst of so much uncertainty regarding how it might come about.

And this isn’t a onetime yes. Every day, in many different ways, we need to keep saying yes, to keep reminding ourselves of

our commitments to the new, even and especially in the midst of doubt.

Mary was also patient. New births take time to gestate, whether it’s the nine months of a human pregnancy or the work of societal transformation that might take years or decades or centuries.

Advent is the season of the liturgical year that teaches us explicitly to wait and prepare our hearts for the coming of something new. I find such patience immensely difficult because I know the urgency of the social and environmental challenges we face. It feels as though every day that we waste makes the consequences of inaction more and more dire. I have to ask God for patience nearly every day.

Mary teaches us to embrace the unknown. In saying yes to Gabriel’s message, Mary embraced an unbelievable amount of uncertainty. How could she know that her betrothed wouldn’t cast her aside when he learned of the pregnancy? And how could she know that she and Joseph would soon become refugees, on the run from Herod’s murderous plans to eliminate any kingly competition from newborns?

I may have some opinions about what God’s new thing will and should look like, but I don’t really know how it will come about and what it will look like. One of my biggest leaps of faith is to let go of my own expectations and to trust, in the midst of the cloud of unknowing, that God knows what God is doing.

LEARNING TO TRUST

What does such trust look like in practice? Mary, the truest of contemplatives, again shows us that the most essential part of trust is to be present to what is: to say yes not only to the promise of the future, but also to each moment that leads to its fulfillment. Being present in this way is one of the most profound spiritual practices there is. It requires deep courage: an ever-opening heart that is willing to embrace uncertain outcomes.

Trusting the future also requires leaning on others. Mary made it through her pregnancy with the help of her cousin Elizabeth. She made it through the birth and tumultuous early years of Jesus’ life with Joseph at her side and surrounded by her kin circles. If I’ve learned anything from being Catholic, it’s that we don’t and can’t make it on our own; we are always surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Ignoring them, imagining that we are going this alone, is a path that leads only to despair.

Finally, and paradoxically, the pathway to God’s new future is paved with gratitude for the present. If we look only toward the new future, pinning all our hopes on it, we can easily miss the gifts along the way and, in an awful irony, we make ourselves less ready for God’s future, not more. As St. Catherine of Siena put it so beautifully, it’s heaven all the way to heaven. Waiting in hope isn’t easy. In fact, I’d say that it’s just as much a miracle as the virgin birth we await on Christmas Day.

HELPFUL

STOP AND REFLECT

TIPS1 Try this experiment to help you learn to wait. Sit quietly for your prayer or meditation. If you have an itch, ache, or pain, don’t move to address it. Sit with that discomfort for the time you’ve committed to prayer. Pay attention to your desire to take care of it, but simply be patient and let it be. Eventually, it will resolve.

2Use this Advent season as an opportunity to discern what new thing to which God might be calling you. Set aside daily time in your prayers to open your heart to this new birth.