The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns

Monday, December 9, 2013
"The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns"

I know, I probably should do something for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, but I didn't think of that this morning.

The first verse of this song goes along with what I've been writing about all Advent -- there's nothing WE do to bring about the great promised peace and light, any more than we bring the morning to pass by "staying strong" in the night.  The morning is always a free gift.  It comes to the strong and the cowering alike.

The King shall come when morning dawns
And light triumphant breaks,
When beauty gilds the eastern hills
And life to joy awakes.

I also love the idea of "life to joy awak[ing]".  We could use a little more of that in this world -- remembering the joy we forget not so much in the bustle (I believe) but in the grime we put up everywhere.  I think that's what most charity work really is -- removing the grime from our collective soul.  Most people who dedicate their lives to charity know that they are unlikely to solve the systemic failures that leaves the majority of the human race in poverty.

We can't bring the dawn, so we light a candle.  We wipe away the grime a little and try to make this place more livable.

I say "we" despite the notable lack of charity work in my life -- unless you count my teaching job, which is legitimate but not as obvious a boon to humanity as if I were teaching at a needy school rather than a posh private school.  I believe in influencing the future of the Catholic Church there, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't feel as "I go where I am needed and help to solve the problems of our world" as teaching at an inner city school -- for all it would break me in half -- would.

Just a guilty little aside because the students went to the sacrament of confession during school today.

Not, as of old, a little child,
To bear, and fight, and die,
But crowned with glory like the sun
That lights the morning sky.

That is Jesus on His Return -- glorious.  He shared our burden once, tried to clear away the source of the grime, but He also fixed the problem.  All that bearing and fighting and dying has been done.  All we have to do is endure.

What an incredible gift.  Over and above everything else -- why do we forget so quickly that the battle is won?  The grand battle in which you can and must at some point feel so powerless, that distracts us from the gritty business of actually helping people, and that seems to be entirely composed of shifting, twisting rhetoric...

It's over.  We won.  We are the mop up crew.  All that matters is doing good to those around us, healing the Body of Christ.  We're not fighting for the grand cause as soldiers in the army marching to battle.  We are tending the wounded of the struggle on both sides.

Or we should be.  No one wants to be that jerk still firing his machine gun at the medics.