Our readings today speak, not of God's presence, but of his absence, or at least the experience of his absence. Isaiah cries out in his distress in exiled: "No one invoked your name or roused himself to catch hold of you. For you hid your face from us, and gave us up to the power of our sins." In our gospel extract, St. Mark's community had know Jesus before his death; they had expected him to return to take them with him. They dwell in that strange time between the 'Already' and the 'Not yet'. God has already been with them; he has not yet returned. But one thing is certain: the overwhelming sense of that community is the absence of God. Mark warns his community to remain alert and awake lest the arrival of their Master escapes them.

There is a far greater sense today of God's absence from the world than there is of God's presence in the world. Perhaps this has always been so; perhaps sense of the absence of God has been a constant in human experience. His sense of absence is so obvious today that we no longer advert to it. Our great grandparents, and probably our grandparents would have been intensely conscious of the presence of God in the world and in their lives. Their everyday language testified to that consciousness. They saluted one another with benedictions, 'God bless you..', 'God save all here'. The other side of the coin of course was that they cursed one another with a devil's vehemence.

However, our world today would not have that same consciousness of the eternal. The synthesis that existed between nature, God and human beings has fallen apart in our day. However, this new experience of 'absence' is not as new as we would wish to think. For example, as early as 1610, the English poet John Donne bemoaned the same development in his day:

The new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out...
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

Today this sense of the 'absence of God' is perhaps more intense (if you can use that word in this connection) that at any time in the history of human experience. In the words of a Spanish theologian, in today's world the very 'question of God remains something irrelevant, or even non-existent for the great majority of people. God is missing but not missed. This is a genuinely new situation, a situation which never existed before in our world.' With our young people especially, unbelief has become an inherited confusion, a sundering of roots, an unassertive puzzlement about religious practices and their language. Unbelief for them is a cultural by-product. Such a contemporary sense of the absence of God is captured by the Australian poet James McAuley who evokes a whole generation of religiously disinherited:

Who do not think or dream, deny or doubt,
But simply don't know what it's all about.'

Advent speaks to this cultural desert. This first Sunday captures that vacuum, that human sense of divine absence. But it is not a hopelessness, a vast absence. Expectation rather than grief marks this season. That expectant optimism is best summed up in the last lines from the Isaiah extract today:

"And yet Lord, you are our Father;
we the clay, you the potter,
we are all the work of your hands."

So this sense of the absence of God, which is so central to contemporary human experience, is also God's creation. The season of Advent addresses this void.

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