Perceptions

 Advent attempts to create within us a receptive frame of mind so that we can better appreciate the significance of Christ’s birth.  This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and our readings encourage us to be awake, watchful, and alert! This actually means changing our perceptions so that we become receptive to the special graces of the Advent season.  We might be open to make such changes if we understand the critical role perceptions play in our lives.   
       We like to believe that we have a firm grip on reality, that we see things the way they are.  In truth, all of us live in and through our perceptions.  We see what we choose to see.  We actually create “reality” by our particular way of looking at things.  We are the way we are and feel the way we feel not so much because of what we experience, but because of how we interpret what we experience.   
       The snowfall, for example, which is a curse to the city driver in a rush, is a blessing to a skier on vacation.  It’s all a matter of viewpoint.  Scrooge was a “scrooge” primarily because of his perceptions.  He perceived life as an endless battle for making money and hoarding it away, and saw people as lazy parasites out to fleece him of his hard-earned gains.  Little wonder that, miserable in his biases, he saw Christmas as no different from any other business day in July.  
       One important consideration about perceptions is that we own them.  We are always responsible for the way we feel.  We can also choose to change our perceptions to improve the quality of our lives.  We can choose, for example, to see the glass half-full rather than half-empty.  Scrooge changed his perceptions because of the visit of the ghosts and became a new man.   
       A whole new life can open up for us by changing the way we look at things.  It is remarkable how different we feel and how different life appears when we do change our perceptions.  People seem different when we approach them with compassion rather than with suspicion.  Snow takes on beauty when we stop looking at it merely as something we have to shovel.  Problems become opportunities for growth when we view them as challenges rather than “rotten luck” we are fated to endure.   
       The key to a new and better life for ourselves is as near at hand as a shift in the way we choose to see things. Our readings for the first Sunday of Advent encourage us to change our perceptions to hope and expectancy of Christ being reborn in us. Jesus truly wanted us to live in peace with one another.  He knew that unless this became the hallmark of our communities our creativity would never be able to truly flower.  We would never become the people we were meant to be.  God cannot give us peace unless we are willing to share it with one another.   
       During our liturgy, as we greet each other in the name of peace, let us also commit ourselves to performing one act of love each day, thereby giving the gift of peace to our family, neighbors, colleagues and world.  In this way we can also foster our own rebirth or growth by changing any perceptions that keep us rigid, narrow-minded, or negative in our thinking!