To you I lift up my soul, O my God. The first words of the liturgy on the first Sunday of Advent are taken from the first verse of Psalm 24: Ad te levavi animam meam.
How fitting it is that the very first thing the Church does, or proclaims, or sings, at the beginning of a new liturgical year, is this: lifting up her soul, her eyes, her heart, her voice to God. At each Mass we hear in the Preface dialogue: Sursum corda - Lift up your hearts! To which we respond: Habemus ad Dominum - we lift them up to the Lord! To do this must be our first duty, our first need, our first desire, of the first importance: to turn to God; to look up to Him; to seek Him; to come to Him, to implore Him; to worship Him.
I suppose that, in former ages, one could simply presume that everyone would get this. Even so: they still needed to hear frequent exhortations or reminders about it in Church, because the world, the flesh and the devil are ever present realities: and they ceaselessly conspire to draw us away from God. So also do our resentments, our preoccupations, our distractions, our sheer superficiality. If this was true in ages of Faith, how much more does it apply to us now, living as we do in the post-modern and secular West! We now inhabit a culture which habitually and entirely excludes God from all discourse and all thought; which never refers to Him, never mentions Him; which patronisingly regards believers as naive, or more likely now as dangerous, and a threat. Who is God? say our contemporaries with an impatient shrug. Where is God? Why bother with God? We don’t need God, and we don’t want God! The trouble is: with the exclusion of God comes also the exclusion of any fixed reference point for human life. So there is no absolute truth; no unchanging moral law; no intrinsic human worth; no ultimate hope. Instead there is a radical openness to the manipulation and tyranny of the strong; and the great barrier to final despair has been effectively removed.
We should not under-estimate the power of this culture to affect even those who strongly and fervently believe. Yes: of course we do try to honour God, when we remember. But also, we easily leave Him out, set Him aside, forget to give Him first place in everything. So it seems to me we need to push hard in the opposite direction. We need to cultivate an ever stronger sense of God’s presence; of His surpassing greatness; His holiness; His otherness; His infinity; His limitless power: this God on whom all things depend, and who depends Himself on nothing whatever; He who is His own glory and perfection and beatitude; He who made us; He who holds us and all things in being; He before whom we all now stand, and to whom we must render an account on the Last Day. God is so great that He is to be feared. You never hear that said nowadays, but it remains true nonetheless, because a wholesome fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. But God is also to be loved, of course, for He is all goodness; He is mercy and compassion, and He ever invites us to come to Him, not for His own good but for ours. So our aim should be to walk in God’s presence every moment of our life; to worship Him with every breath we take; to flee from forgetfulness of Him, which is folly and madness and wickedness and death.
Of course the God we worship has to be the true one, and not a false one, of our own or someone else’s making: not an idol, or even worse, a demon. The scriptures of the Old Testament put great emphasis on this. The people of Israel worshipped the God who revealed Himself to Abraham and to Moses and to all the Prophets. He is One, and there is no other. He created all that exists from nothing, and He called Israel to be His own people.
So the Israelite Psalmist sang: The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? (26:1) ... One thing I ask, that I will seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; to see the delight of the Lord, and visit his Temple (26:4-5)... Or again: Look to the Lord and be enlightened... Taste and see how sweet is the Lord... (Ps 33:5,8)
We Christians love these and other Psalm verses, and we pray them with ever renewed profit and joy. But in addition, of course, we know that the one who supremely reveals God to us is our Lord Jesus Christ. And we know that now we are to relate to God as Jesus did, while walking on earth as man. We see in the New Testament how Jesus lived in a permanent state of adoration of his heavenly Father; in the humility of worship; in the intimacy of love; in ready and willing obedience.
My food, he says, is to do the will of him who sent me (Jn 4:34); I know him, because I have my being from him, and it was he who sent me (7:28); I am in the Father, and the Father is in me (14:10); I have kept his commandments, and abide in his love (15:10); I am not alone, for the Father is with me (16:32). Then just before his Passion begins Jesus prays: Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these have known that you have sent me. I have made your name known to them, and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them (17:26).
Through the revelation of Jesus, we know that God is Trinity, that His name is Love, and that we can relate to Him as our Father. Coming to this God must involve for us certain renunciations and mortifications: but in coming to Him we come to a goodness, a joy, a delight, beyond anything this world with all its pleasures could ever offer. Now we can even see the face of God, in the face of Jesus. And this God invites us to union with Himself; a union whose best image is that of human marriage.
At the beginning of a new liturgical Year, let the call resound once again. Open the doors of your heart, and soul, and mind, to God! Turn to Him; pray to Him; allow Him to do His work in you. Receive his gifts of salvation, of life, of indwelling presence, of eternal love. Then with St. Francis of Assisi cry out: My God and my all! And of Jesus: He for me is everything; He alone. And so we pray: You alone do I seek, O Lord; you alone are my God! Speak then to my heart, call to me, let me hear your still small voice, as it ever whispers deep within: “Come to the Father.”