Remember the movie, A Few Good Men, and the Jack Nicholson line, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth?” Well to some extent Jack was right, although not about what he was talking about in the movie.
We all say we want the truth no matter what the consequences, but we want only what we want to hear. If a doctor is telling us we need to change our habits, we tend not to want to hear that we have to give up oatmeal raisin cookies or something else. There are so many other ways we either hear or know through our own conscience that we need to do things differently, but we can’t “handle the truth.”
Well Advent offers us a time to begin again — to handle the truth. We are also called to speak the truth, not just what people want to hear. In so doing we become prophets of the hope of Advent.
During Advent we begin again to handle the truth about ourselves, and speak the truth about God through our words and deeds.
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