The Unfolding of Advent
O Lover,
Last week signaled the end of liturgical year #2023. We have now crossed into Advent (“coming” or “arrival”), a four-sunday season characterized by anticipation, waiting, silence, attentiveness, penitential preparation, and hope of fulfillment. However, intrinsic to this precursor of the Feast of the Nativity is a measure of tension: between darkness and light; the already and the not yet; precariousness and promise. All of this and more can give rise to queries of puzzlement: for whom do we wait if You, O Lover, have never been other than here and now? what does it mean for us to await both recapitulation of the Bethlehem birth and Your Christ’s cosmic “second coming”? and who needs to arrive: You or ourselves? Instead of a headlong rush toward The Feast, whether liturgically or commercially, Advent is a season of desire, of deferred celebration, of pensive readying. Amid Sol’s protracted surrender there is something hauntingly mysterious a-borning, but for now we wait.
O Lover, might this not be my favorite season, one paradoxically laced with such true-to-life ambiguity? The dimness, the deferred satisfaction, the yearning, and the aura of Mystérium all contribute to what is a kaíros narthex of the church year, something akin to what Heschel called a “cathedral in time.” But rather than appearing instantaneously in full flower, my experience of Advent, like that of You and the Jesus tradition, has relentlessly unfolded and expanded across the decades, for none of my images of You is ever definitive. Thus, more than waiting for Your coming, I ask You to open me more widely to awareness of Your Presence—intrinsic, immanent, ubiquitous—as ancient as the Flaring Forth. Furthermore, Your incarnatedness and permeatedness encompass all which was formerly riven between sacred and profane, for “the entire earth is full of [Your] glory” (Is 6:3). In Advent we are being incrementally opened to ever-expanding glimpses of Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28).
Or stated differently, increasingly central in everything has been an inkling, an intimation, a hint. Recurring again and again are moments of consciousness of something wondrous below and beyond sense and intellect. Over the decades, inconsistently yet recurringly, all of this more and more smacks of You, O Lover. In this dimension beyond and below there is sense of Your brooding, Your Lover-hauntedness. Despite the vagaries of my awareness of Your Depth the translucency recurs and persists. The ubiquity and universality of Your “more” beyond all else is suggested by Angela of Foligno (c.1248-1309) in her “the world is pregnant with [You],” a statement in which Annunciation (Lk 1:26-38) is seemingly extrapolated to Christification of the kósmos itself.
Indeed, intimation of pregnancy with You, O Lover, is an apt and powerful image for both the Advent season and our ominous multifaceted crisis. Advent is invitation to “the evidence of things not [yet] seen” (Heb 11:1), the hint of a mysterious a-borning, to be universally realized and ubiquitously epiphanized. Thus the stakes are high, whether now or any other time, for apart from our awareness of Your emergent “showcasing,” all is, at least seemingly, lost. While our plea is Maranátha! (“O Lord, come!” [I Cor 16:22]), it is actually we who need to “come” into an ever-enlarged consciousness of Your Oneing of all things. Heading up the church year is Advent’s practice of attentiveness, both active and passive, to the Mystérium of Your emerging encompassingness. And so in the dimness, silence, and waiting, we prepare to be received by You, O Lover, as never before.
What we await, in a word, is neither this or that, but the fuller experience of You. Advent is our season of longing for You. Bid us come, O Lover.
