Imagine your future as a road that lies ahead. Its hills offer visions. Its bends hide what is coming. Roads are an Advent theme as the Church celebrates its new year on the 1st Sunday of Advent and remembers the roads believers have traveled in history.
Out of faith students walk Cesar Chavez Avenue to Sunset Drive and Wilshire in Los Angeles each year. They celebrate Advent with their hunger walk that is a pilgrimage on the streets and roads where the homeless wander and the rich drive expensive cars.
Journeys fill Israel’s history. God calls Abraham and Sarah to a new land and promises them descendants as numerous as the star. They travel to the new land and make a journey of faith as they await a child.
Moses leads the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt where they journey 40 years in the desert and become a people of the commandments.
For Jews history is never an endless cycle of seasons but a promise of God’s faithfulness. “The days are coming when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah,” the prophet Jeremiah says in Sunday’s first reading.
We, the Church, are a pilgrim people until Christ comes again. The Second Vatican Council explains that “until the arrival of the new heavens and the new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church…carries the mark of this world which will pass and takes its place among the creatures which groan, suffer the pains of childbirth, and await the revelation of the children of God” (Lumen Gentium #48).
A road is a metaphor for the journey each of us makes in life, the path we create with our choices. On the road we climb hills and walk dark valleys. We follow bends that take us beyond where we imagine we are going.
Perhaps I take an advanced math class that pulls me toward engineering. Perhaps I volunteer to run a food drive at school and realize I’m good at organizing and want to help make life fairer for poor people.
Our journeys bring us to crossroads where we have to choose a direction for moving ahead. We find our path by walking and making choices as we go, such as where to apply for college or whether to continue taking music lessons.
On our journeys we meet other travelers, coming from other directions or joining us side by side for a while. They influence us. World and national events influence us.
Every Advent we hear echoes of the prophet Second Isaiah who envisions a road home from exile in Babylon about 540 B.C. “Prepare the way of the Lord,” Isaiah says. The Persian king Cyrus sends the exiles home. They find a road through the wilderness as their ancestors found a dry path through the sea.
The roads and streets the St. Paul students walk take them on a spiritual journey. They pound the cement sidewalks as the homeless do. They have to find bathrooms and places of rest. They travel among rich and poor and experience in their own tired legs and bodies the cost of providing meals for the homeless at the Catholic Worker.
The students walk farther than they ever imagined. They make a difference together they never could alone. They experience the power of common cause for ending hunger.
We celebrate new year’s day in the Christian calendar not with confetti but with Advent wreaths and four candles marking the weeks of preparation for Christmas. For Christians Jesus fulfills God’s promises and we continue his work.