#adventapertures2025: day 7

“Advent is a story of Old Testament prophecies.

It is a story of cosmic fulfillment.

The dream of a world repaired

in the holy darkness of Advent.

A whisper is heard, words are formed.”

Rev Lisha Epperson

Packing to go on holiday always induces fear in me as well as excitement.  It is the fear of leaving the familiar, where everything I need is within reach, including, in an emergency, known medics and hospitals.  Going on a journey to deepest darkest Dorset or Derbyshire, at most a few hours drive from home, is not going to take me far out of reach of any amenities I might, in an unlikely event, need to reach.  And with the aid of telecommunications and electricity, however ‘unreliable’ the rural broadband, points of help are never far from my fingertips.  

But such rational knowledge doesn’t extinguish the psychic fear coming from the most ancient part of my brain: the fear of the unknown, the threat of the unfathomable.

Advent is the time in the Christian liturgical calendar where such fears are let loose.  I deliberately turn and face, in the shortening light of the day and the growing darkness of night, the God who defies my comprehension.  This God who is yet the same God who loves me as their intimate child.

Ronald Blythe, who for years was the author of the Church Times column Words from Wormingford, writes about this tension which lies at the heart of Advent:

It is Advent and Isaiah and Amos thunder and sing to us in turn, the Official and the self-confessed unofficial prophets, entrancing speakers both. It was actually Isaiah who followed Amos’s inspired outbursts, the theme of which was the need of their nation to have a higher concept of God than that which prevailed in the Temple services. So they sang his glory, Isaiah in the process reaching those heights of Messianic prediction which echo in our Advent hymns. As with pregnancy, Advent is more disturbing than the actual birth. It is full of fear and dread. Advent – God’s adventure is entering his own creation. Its language is unsparing, its consequence incalculable. It follows me into the bank, into Marks and Spencer’s, into the library, and makes severe argument with the pleasant trash of the season. (Next to Nature, 426)

Theologian Wil Gafney calls this Advent pregnancy a “sacred blackness”, which recalls the first creative act of the world:

In the velvet darkness, darker than a thousand midnights down in a cypress swamp, this luminous darkness, this radiant blackness, the wholly black and holy black womb of God pulsed life into the world against a tapestry of holy life-giving darkly radiant blackness, shaping, molding, knitting, coalescing earthstuff from starstuff from Godstuff. All before uttering the first word.

A God able to do this is a God I should fear.  But this same God for whom I wait, for whom I prepare to meet is also this God: ‘the One for whose Advent we wait chose the flesh of a woman for the glory of the incarnation, that intimate bleeding flesh that the world of men wanted to leave behind, thus forever sanctifying woman-flesh and all human-flesh.’  Gafney goes on:

The time between the Advents is a pregnant time, indeed the earth is already in labor in apostle’s view. Now is a waiting time. Now is a watching time. And now is a working time. Jesus calls our attention to the people the world, and sometimes the church, says will be left behind. For much of human history women have been kept behind if not left behind. …And, for much of our history folk have wanted to leave gay folk and queer folk behind, yet Jesus comes to us through a miracle that transcends and queers gender roles, God-beyond-gender yet disclosed as the feminine spirit conceived a child with a human woman. From as soon as one person had two sticks while another had only one, we have left people behind in poverty and inequity. Yet Jesus came to us poor and under-housed. We are building walls – lying about building physical walls – while building legislative walls and the border-crossing Jesus is an asylum seeker. If we are not careful, we might just leave Jesus behind, not recognizing him because we’ve lost the sight and sound of the divine poetry in every human person.

Gafney’s powerful words challenge me: Am I prepared to meet this breaking-down-walls-God, this beyond-gender-God, this working-God on my Advent journey this year?  Am I prepared – with fear, with hope, with courage, with excitement – to go into the places where I am likely to meet them?  Am I prepared to hunt them down in the unlikeliest of places – places within myself and without my walls?

Aristotle said in the first sentence of his Metaphysics: ‘All men by nature desire to know.’  This is the secret magic and danger of having a mind. Even though your body is always bound to one place, your mind is a relentless voyager. The mind has a magnificent, creative restlessness that always brings it on a new journey. Even in the most sensible and controlled lives there is often an undertow of longing that would deliver them to distant shores. There is something within you that is not content to remain fixed within any one frame. You cannot immunize yourself against your longing. You love to reach beyond, to discover something new. Knowing calls you out of yourself. Discovery delights the heart. This is the natural joy of childhood and the earned joy of the artist. The child and the artist are pilgrims of discovery. When you limit your life to the one frame of thinking, you close out the mystery. When you fence in the desires of your heart within fixed walls of belief, morality and convention, you dishonour the call to discovery. You create grey fields of ‘quiet desperation’. Discovery is the nature of the soul. There is some wildness of divinity in us, calling us to live everything. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said: ‘To be dead is to stop believing in/The masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.’

John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes (257)

a pilgrim of discovery (iPhone image)