“I’m thinking about the end of time in another way,” says Ann Garrido. “Because end can mean the conclusion, the finish, but it can also mean the purpose.” For 25 years, Ann has taught homiletics, pastoral theology and catechetics at Aquinas Institute of Theology, written 10 books and spoken at more than 350 gatherings.
A longtime catechist in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd movement, Ann offers her reflection for a planned Advent reconciliation service at St. Thomas More Parish in Decatur, Ga. She begins with a conversation from the parish atrium about the end of time—children offering answers like “God will be all in all” and “there will be peace,” before one boy insists his paradise is “hamburgers.” From there, she moves into Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom and the real work of reconciliation: making peace with those closest to us—whoever our ‘X’ is, the sibling we fight with, the friend we’ve fallen out with, the neighbor who drives us crazy.
Part of the “Preaching for the Sacraments” series, host Ricardo da Silva, S.J., speaks with Ann about what distinguishes Advent reconciliation from Lent. Ann looks to the ancient roots of confession, where the early “confessors” proclaimed faith rather than only naming sin: “What we’re really confessing is our belief in a God who can heal and work out things that we ourselves are not gonna be able to fix.” Ricardo echoes this reframing: “Perhaps it’s helpful not to think of it only as a confession of sin, but really also a confession of faith that we go there to proclaim our faith in a God who heals the impossible.”
Ann also reflects on a glioblastoma diagnosis and how it has clarified her sense of call. She emphasizes that personal stories in preaching must serve the congregation, not the preacher: “If the purpose of me sharing anything of my own story is ever me, I’ve gone outside the boundaries of what a good preaching should participate in.”
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A Liturgy of Penance and Reconciliation in Advent: Ann Garrido preaches on Isaiah 11:1-10
As many of you know, I spend a lot of time with the elementary aged children in our parish as a catechist, and it’s one of my great joys of life to get to read scripture with them and talk about what they’ve heard. Though, I need to tell you in advance, sometimes these conversations get a little bit wacky. Now, I’m sure that’s no surprise to you, you’re their parents, you’re their grandparents. But I wanna share with you a snippet of a conversation that I had with a group of our kids, not so long in the distant past. It was just before the Feast of Christ the King. You know, the end of November. And I had mentioned as we came to the end of another church year, that maybe this should be raising some questions in our own mind about the end of time overall.
Like where is history, where is time itself headed? Now, probably I did not word this as carefully as I should have because quickly the conversation got out of control. One of the kids said, “In 5 billion years, the sun’s gonna go out.” And then another child chimed in, “But first the sun is gonna expand to five times its size, and then it’s gonna incinerate the earth.” And others started yelling. I thought, well, this is going downhill, fast. Paused. “So 5 billion years is a long, long way from now,” I said, “maybe not something that we need to be too worried about.”
I’m thinking about the end of time in another way, you know, because end can mean conclusion, the finish, but it can also mean, it can also mean like the purpose. Like where’s time headed? Kind of like you could say about the end of this pen that I’m holding. It could be the eraser, but you could also say that the end of this pen is, it’s to write. We’ve talked about before, God having a plan for our earth, a purpose that we’re on the way toward. Do you remember that? What does the Bible call this moment?
Now I’ll say the children looked really disappointed when I asked this. Like we turned into a classroom, they hung their head a little bit. “The parousia,” said one child. “And what’s the Bible tell us the parousia looks like?” I asked. “God will be all in all,” said another child quoting 1 Corinthians. “Yes,” said a third, “There will be peace. And then the next day, the sun will explode.” And everybody started talking about supernovas again. There are times with children, I tell you that I am entirely unsure what to say next. So I just sighed in the moment and I said, “Do you really think this is so? Do you really think this is what God has dreamed for our earth?” And this one little guy goes, “Well, what if I think each of us has our own personal parousia?” Now happy to be off the top of exploding stars. I said, “Well, that’s an interesting idea. What do you think your own personal parousia might look like?” “I don’t know. I haven’t grown up yet.”
Trying to draw on our parish’s Ignatian tradition, I said, “Well, sometimes, sometimes we get clues about what our own purpose in life might be. What gives us our greatest joy, our deepest joy?” “That would be hamburgers,” he said to me, “If I have a hamburger, I’m happy for 50 days.” Now, I tell you, this was so not going in the direction that I had planned for our class that day that I was just about ready to give up all hope, when the girl across the table said, “But what if you had just eaten a hamburger, and you went home, and you found out your dog had died, would you still be happy?” Now, a hamburger boy pauses here for a moment, and he says, “Well, I guess I need hamburgers and my dog.” And she pressed him, “But what if your best friend had died?” “Okay, okay,” he admitted, “I’m happy when I have some hamburgers and my dog and my mom and my dad and my friends and my sister. Though sometimes I fight with my sister.”
And all I can say is that finally in our bizarro conversation, we had arrived at a tiny moment of truth. Now it is tiny, right? But nonetheless important. It is relationships that give meaning to our lives. They give us clues about who we are, about who we’re meant to be. In the end, our end is to live in relationship. Now, scripture gives us many images of the end of our lives, indeed the end of all of creation. And many of them center around the theme of the great reconciliation of all relationships. In the passage from Isaiah that we heard tonight, wolves are guests of lambs leopards laid down next to pray, children play with lethal snakes. Creatures that would never be caught dead with one another, or literally would be dead if they were caught with one another, are able to live in harmony, free of danger, free of fear.
It makes such a beautiful picture and lots of lovely Christmas artwork. But lest we miss Isaiah’s real point here. It’s important that we continue with the passage just beyond what we would’ve heard this past Sunday when it was our first reading. He shall gather the outcasts of Israel, the dispersed of Judah. He shall assemble from the four corners of the earth. The envy of Ephraim shall pass away the rivalry of Judah be removed. Ephraim shall not be jealous of Judah. Judah shall not be hostile to Ephraim. These are God’s people that Isaiah’s really talking about. These are God’s people healing their differences from one another and able to live in harmony, free of danger and free of fear. The coming of God’s kingdom has less to do with lions becoming vegetarian than about Israelis laying down next to Palestinians, Ukrainians eating alongside Russians. Dare I say, Republicans and Democrats. But no, no, even this is too comfortably distant from us. It has to do with my little hamburger eating friend and his sister. It has to do with me and friction with a group of longtime friends. It has to do with you and, well, you know who.
Tonight, we gather in the advent season to celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation, a conversation inside of a confessional that in our larger culture, others would find even wackier than my conversation with our parish’s children. Because in an incredibly hectic and incredibly busy time of year, when there are gifts to buy and cards to address and cookies to bake, why stop and speak aloud about troubling relationships, lingering hurts and fears, places in our lives where we can’t find harmony? Why? Because we know that what we are here to do tonight is a tiny foreshadowing of that great ultimate reconciliation of all of creation that the prophets promise.
And it’s more than just a foreshadowing, it is a step toward it. God is not gonna bring about the parousia without our collaboration. And in truth, we are only devoted to world peace, to the degree that we are committed to reconcile with our most annoying neighbor, with our most irresponsible teenager, with our most ungrateful partner. In truth, our prayerful singing of peace on earth goodwill to men is only as sincere as our effort to live in peace and goodwill with the friend who blew us off, with the boss who laid us off, with the driver who flicked us off. We can only hope for the parousia to the degree that we ourselves are willing to participate in it.
And it strikes me that Isaiah and those prophets of old, they must have had tremendous, just tremendous imaginations to be able, in their eyes, to imagine a picture of the world being another way than it is at a time when most of the cultures around them just saw the world spiraling in an endless cycle of seasons in which nothing ever really changed. The Jewish prophets, they pictured time heading somewhere, they thought it could be different than what it was. They sensed that God had a plan.
And likewise, to participate in the sacrament of reconciliation requires each of us, of each of us a tremendous act of imagination. For we have to be able to picture our relationships as different relationships than we have right now. Ourselves as different people than we are right now. We have to be able to see ourselves getting out of an endless cycle of tit for tat, bitterness, hurt, anger, addiction that we find ourselves spinning in and going someplace new, becoming more and more the persons that God dreams us to be. We have to believe that God has in mind an end for us.
Now, I have a hard time imagining cows and bears being neighbors. I have a harder time imagining Ukrainians and Russians being neighbors. But I have the hardest time of all imagining me and “X” as neighbors for all of eternity. And yet it’s looking like that’s what God has in the works. Perhaps the place to begin our examination of conscience tonight is an act of imagination, considering what our lives would look like, if God we’re all in all inside of us, what our lives would look like if there was true peace, true peace inside of us, a fullness of light and life. If God’s dream were realized inside of us, what would be different? Who would you be sitting next to? What would you be doing? What would no longer trouble you? What would be healed?
Now here’s the good news: We don’t have to figure out how to make that happen on our own. Though God needs collaborators to bring about the great reconciliation, ultimately it is God’s work. And so it is in the sacrament of reconciliation as well. All we need to do is to confess, and let’s be clear what it is that we’re confessing. We’re confessing where things in our lives are not living up to God’s plan. It’s true. But more than that, we are confessing our belief that God is so good and so powerful, that what seems impossible can become possible. That virgins can give birth, that the dead can rise, that wolves can lay down next to lambs. And that God, despite all of our falls, all of our failings, indeed not only can but will help us to reach our end. All that we need to do is to imagine. All that we need to do is to believe. And tonight, all that we need to do is ask.
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