Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent, holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.
I’ve been posting on Advent this week, and why? Because it’s coming, and as the wisdom of Catholic tradition teaches us, we don’t just prepare for the feast – we prepare for the preparation.
Praying with the Church over the past weeks, we’ve seen and heard that, as the Scriptures and prayers of the liturgy nudge us towards considering those Last Things, what awaits us personally and cosmically.
It will end.
So what do we do now?
Advent has a number of dimensions and layers. But amid all of them, shuffling through the layers of past, present and future, we keep being brought around to that center, which is, indeed, right at the center: now.
The now of you and your life, the now of this world’s careening, spinning existence.
Amid the general dis-ease, uneasiness, division and frustration that seems to mark so many of our lives now, it seems to me there’s a singular constant: the suspicion, if not outright conviction, that we’re enveloped by narratives, most of them false and many maliciously so, by tales we’re being told from all sides, and that it’s all coming so relentlessly, we don’t have the time or the expertise to tease out fact from fiction, to fight through the narratives to figure out, and most importantly, live in what’s just…real.
Can Advent help?
Thomas Merton wrote a lot of poetry. A stanza from his poem “Advent” is at the top of this post. You can read the entire poem here. Perhaps sit with it for a minute – even just the verse up at the top there. What the necessary stance for an Advent that’s more than just “preparation?”
…minds, as meek as beasts…
….close at home….
…intellects…quieter than the flocks…
Instead of pride, meekness. Instead of endless activity of the spirit, staying still, at home. Instead of noisy striving, quiet.
And perhaps in that quiet, away from the narratives, we can hear the truth. Not a truth of later, or someday or the end of time, but the truth of now.
As I mentioned a bit ago, Merton collected some of his liturgical writing in Seasons of Celebration. One chapter is called “Advent: Hope or Delusion?”
In it, Merton emphasizes the present part of the Advent equation:
The certainty of Christian hope lies beyond passion and beyond knowledge. Therefore we must sometimes expect our hope to come in conflict with darkness, desperation and ignorance. Therefore, too, we must remember that Christian optimism is not a perpetual sense of euphoria, an indefectible comfort in whose presence neither anguish nor tragedy can possibly exist. We must not strive to maintain a climate of optimism by the mere suppression of tragic realities. Christian optimism lies in a hope of victory that transcends all tragedy: a victory in which we pass beyond tragedy to glory with Christ crucified and risen.
It is important to remember the deep, in some ways anguished seriousness of Advent, when the mendacious celebrations of our marketing culture so easily harmonize with our tendencey to regard Christmas, consciously or otherwise, as a return to our own innocence and our own infancy. Advent should remind us that the “King Who is to Come” is more than a charming infant smiling (or if you prefer a dolorous spirituality, weeping) in the straw. There is certainly nothing wrong with the traditional family jours of Christmas, nor need we be ashamed to find ourselves still able to anticipate them without too much ambivalence. After all, that in itself is no mean feat.
But the Church in preparing us for the birth of a “great prophet,” a Savior and a King of Peace, has more in mind than seasonal cheer. The Advent mystery focuses the light of faith upon the very meaning of life, of history, of man, of the world and of our own being. In Advent we celebrate the coming and indeed the presence of Christ in our world. We witness to His presence even in the midst of all its inscrutable problems and tragedies. Our Advent faith is not an escape from the world to a misty realm of slogans and comforts which declare our problems to be unreal, our tragedies inexistent…
…St. Gregory the Great said that all Christians should continue the prophetic mission of John (the Baptist) and point out the presence of Christ in the world. This may mean many different things. John was able to point out Christ at the Jordan, in a moment of fulfillment, which gave meaning to his whole life. But John also had to witness to Christ in prison, in the face of death, in failure, when even the meaning of his other glorious moment seemed to have been cancelled out.
So, too, we may at times be able to show the world Christ in moments when all can clearly discern in history, some confirmation of the Christian message. But the fact remains that our task is to seek and find Christ in our world as it is, and not as it might be. The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it and that His plan has been neither frustrated nor changed: indeed, all will be done according to His will. Our Advent is a celebration of this hope. What is uncertain is not the ‘coming’ of Christ but our own reception of him, our own readiness and capacity to ‘go forth to meet him.’ We must be willing to see Him and acclaim Him, as John did, even at the very moment when our whole life’s work and meaning seem to collapse. Indeed, more formidable still, the Church herself may perhaps be called upon some day to point out the Victorious Redeemer and King of Ages amid the collapse of all that has been laboriously built up by the devotion of centuries and cultures that sincerely intended to be Christian.
…The secret of the Advent mystery is then the awareness that I begin where I end because Christ begins where I end.
How much of our lives do we spend convinced that the Real Me can only be born in different circumstances, in a change, in progress, in something – anything – that is just not now or the way things are?
How much of our lives are defined and shaped by narratives, created and imposed by any number of forces, not one of them God?
Advent is, once again, that gift of a moment in time to settle in with the People of God, journeying in the wilderness, in shadows, in servitude, in suffering, spirits quiet, minds meek, humble and open, patient and wakeful, listening in our “solemn valleys,” not for yet one more narrative to confirm our fears and suspicions, but for the sound – which can be heard whereever we are in this moment – of the real, beating heart of Love.
Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets’ stately setting,
Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!