Stretched By God

This year the Advent theme chosen by my former parish in St. Louis, St. Cronan Church, is “Stretched by God.” I have found it helpful to contemplate this concept.

In all our Advent scripture readings, we see people being stretched. John the Baptist is called out of his comfort zone as an ascetic in the desert to become a prophet who calls people to repentance and prepares the way for Jesus. When Zachariah, John’s father, is struck dumb before John’s birth, he is stretched beyond his limited understanding to trust in the mystery of God’s ways. Elizabeth and Mary have their very bodies stretched by pregnancy, and their identities are expanded to include the role of mother. Joseph is stretched by the call to look beyond the strictures of Jewish law when Mary is found to be pregnant before marriage, and he is asked to take on a new identity as a foster father.

In this year of the COVID-19 pandemic, alll of us have been stretched in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Forget about being clay—it feels more like we are Silly Putty as we reimagine the way we work, go to school, worship, shop, interact with people outside our immediate family, grieve and bury our dead, and celebrate holidays. Most of us resist being stretched to such an extent, but the poet Rainer Maria Rilke offers an interesting perspective in his book Letters to a Young Poet:

“Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know that work they are accomplishing within you?”

The stretching we are experiencing is accomplishing a work within us that we aren’t able to see yet. We are called to trust that it will bear fruit as we become more creative, resilient, accustomed to living with less, experienced in new ways of prayer, and attentive to the needs of the people we live with. Living in a pandemic and letting God into your life are both a stretch, but resistance leads to suffering and loss of richness compared with the growth we experience when we flow with life’s realities and mysteries.