O How Shall I Receive You?
O Lover,
We humans are denizens of the cosmos, embodieds whose sole venue is where form, sense, and thought are operative. It is in this life, this finite setting, in which we find ourselves. Thus we need neither despise our formedness nor dismiss it as a mere antechamber to something else. In this regard the gospel song of my origins—“This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”—is misleading at best. Here and now, planet Earth is our neighborhood.
Yet rather than content with being warehoused in said venue we sundry peoples and traditions experience in various ways a “pull” toward—what?—a greater fullness, a richer kairoticality, than what our creaturely toolkit can “apprehend,” to say nothing of “comprehend.” One of life’s great findings is the emerging universality of that “draw.” Implicit in the splendor of the cosmos, ourselves not excluded, would seem to be innumerable inklings luring us deeper into dimensions our ordinary tools cannot seize. Thus each of these two very different paragraphs points to something paradoxically nonnegotiable about being human.
For us of the tradition of Jesus the above tension is showcased in Advent, a whetting season in which we long that the apertures of our heart might be dilated so as to receive You more fully, a time of leaning forward attentively and anticipatorily. Whether in identification with the yearning for the Messiah in the Hebrew prophets or in hope for a fuller manifestation of Your kin-dom among followers of the “the Way” of Jesus in the newer testament, we ache for a greater experiencing of You, Immanuel (“[You inextricably] with us”). Over the intervening millennia various characteristics have come to be attached to this season: stillness, dimness, purgation, waiting, preparing, expecting, hoping. It is especially in the recapitulation of the gestation of Mary’s son that we cry out with St. Angela of Foligno, TOSF (c.1248-1309), “The world is pregnant with God!” While it is always longing time, thus understood, Your “draw” potentially ambushing us in every here and now, Advent plants our longing and Your lavishness most unavoidably before the eyes of our hearts. “Like the deer pants for running streams” (Ps 42:1), we are desiring to receive You more fully, and You are ever-arriving.
But in addition to both the desire of nations and Your perpetual coming, there is the matter of our actual response to You; the Lutheran Paul Gerhardt’s 1653 hymn phrases the query thus: “O how shall I receive Thee . . .?” The camino from Advent to Epiphany atrophies into mere nostalgic or aesthetic jolt apart from the question of how we welcome Your coming. The one for whose birth and consummation we wait is he to whom the Fourth Evangelist attributes these words: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And what he is showing us of You in all four gospels, O Lover, is shorthanded by the image of Your “Reigning” (better “Kin-dom”) for which we pray daily (Mt 6:10). Do we receive You, “beholding Christ’s image as in a mirror, by allowing ourselves to be transformed by You into that same image, from one degree of glory to another” (II Cor 3:18)? Is Advent not then a special invitation to embrace as our own “the mind [attitude, disposition] of Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5)? Is it not a four week sit in preparation for being drawn yet more deeply into nothing less than Your Divine Life?
Arguably the paradigmatic response to Your impendingness is none other than that of Mary as captured in her fiat: “may it be done to me according to Your word” (Lk 1:38). But just as Your messenger solicited her assent to the unfathomable, so You wait, hat in hand, for each and all of our responses to Your offer of nothing less than the watershed of Incarnátio. As with her, we are invited to respond with the scale and depth of surrender (gelássenheit). Thus we see that all of our yeses, like hers, are of one cloth: yielding to Your relentless bent on Self-disclosure in the stuff of creation. Ergo, Your enfleshment, even more propensity than event, continues on, and each of us is invited to participate in Your ever-unfolding Incarnation.
