The Second Week of Advent: Finding God in the Desert
December 8, 2024 | Caitlin Morneau | Sunday’s Readings
The Word of God came to John in the desert. In the desert of all places.
When I was in college, my campus minister offered us a busy student Advent retreat. I remember my freshman year when it felt so immensely fruitful. The scripture, mini-reflections, and mix CD songs so easily accessed the depths of my heart’s longing.
In the years that followed, I tried to recreate that “thin space” of nearness to Christ’s coming, but I often felt that it was just beyond my reach.
In December of 2020, I was very pregnant with my son, Colby. The stillness of life in the pandemic enabled a “thin space” in which I journeyed with the Blessed Mother through our third trimesters, illuminating the season in entirely new ways. To this day, I cherish this memory because I know it cannot be recreated.
Two thousand years ago, John the Baptist was overcome by the “thin space” of anticipating Jesus’ ministry. I love this image of disheveled John, barefoot and hairy with stray twigs embedded in his tattered garments, reciting Isaiah from the hillside: “Prepare the way of the Lord!”
In all of this image’s frenetic energy, it is not lost on me that, just prior, John was in the desert. A place of wilderness that often feels far from God and all things familiar — barren, confusing, with a certain awareness of lurking temptation.
But that was where God showed up.
It is here, in contemplating the desert, that I feel a profound sense of solidarity with people who are suffering — especially my brothers and sisters in the deserts of violence, victimization, and incarceration. These siblings in Christ have been my greatest teachers on matters of hope, mercy, healing, and transformation because they have grappled in the wildernesses of grief, repentance, anguish, and self emptying. And again, I’m reminded that this is where God shows up.
But God rarely does so in a burst of light with obvious answers or clear instruction. At least not for me. For me, God shows up in a curious whisper, murmured in the dark, with a message that does not tell me what to do next, but reframes the way I see the road ahead.
I recently had a sacred opportunity to visit Assisi, Italy, and gaze upon the San Damiano cross, where St. Francis first heard the call to “Rebuild my Church.” You know how the story goes. Francis started collecting construction materials to renovate the dilapidated church, but that was not the rebuilding being asked of him.
Today, in the dilapidated, vengeance-driven criminal legal system available to us in the U.S., a still small voice says “prepare the way.” Not by hoarding power or digging deeper and deeper pits of retribution. But by proclaiming the liberating justice of Christ in our words and actions.
Beginning this Christmas, we will celebrate a year of Jubilee, when the global Church boldly proclaims what it means to be a people committed to hope and forgiveness. So let us prepare the way …
Prepare the way by offering mercy.
Prepare the way by initiating reparation.
Prepare the way by praying for the grace to forgive.
Prepare the way by choosing hope over despair — over and over again.
Prepare the way by visioning a world where the death penalty is no more and healing, liberating, forms of justice prevail. And when this vision feels too far out of reach, remember that “The Word of God came to John in the desert.”
Reflection Author: Caitlin Morneau
Caitlin Morneau serves as Catholic Mobilizing Network’s Director of Restorative Justice. She oversees program development that advances healing approaches to harm and crime in Catholic communities. Caitlin joined the CMN team in 2017 after seven years of direct social services, volunteer management, operations, and program implementation at faith-based and secular non-profits such as Catholic Charities of Baltimore, Catholic Volunteer Network, Youth Service Opportunities Project, and Bethlehem Farm.
She holds an MA in Conflict Transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University and is a current student of theology at Catholic Theological Union. Caitlin lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband, two children, and black lab.