(The Nationalist, November 2004)
There are hints of mortality about the dark days of winter. And that’s not a bad thing either. To think of where we’re going, and of what’s coming, is a good way of focussing the mind on the present, of helping to focus on priorities.
Death is a process that begins at birth. And it’s a friend, not an enemy. It helps us to see that life is going somewhere; it’s not a meaningless meander to nowhere in particular. I am reminded of this when I use a word processor. If you want to stop it, you go to Start, and from there you shut it down. Start leads to stop.
We humans have within us a longing for fulfilment, along with an often painful sense of un-fulfilment. All life is ultimately lonely. (It could be said in passing that there sometimes may be no lonelier place than the marriage bed.) There is an emptiness in every person that cries out for completion. We want to live life to the full, but are confronted everywhere by the evidence of our limitedness. This hunger is God’s way of whetting our appetite for the divine. It is a powerful urge which can lead a person astray, chasing after false fulfilment which leaves the person empty.
We live with a hunger for self-transcendence. We do not have within us the ultimate reason for ourselves, or the fulfilment of our hopes. We have a capacity for the infinite, for reaching out beyond ourselves to what surpasses us. Saint Augustine from North Africa put it well, saying, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will know no rest until they rest in you’.
The period of four weeks before Christmas, which the church calls Advent (the word means Coming or Arriving), is a period of waiting for God who has in fact already come, and who is also yet to come, God who is present here and now and yet awaited. Life is waiting for God, and also waiting with God.
Advent is about looking for the presence of God today, more than looking forward to the coming of someone who is already here. We get glimpses of God in life, and mostly from ordinary experiences, not “churchy” ones, for instance, in the birth of a child, recovery from illness, a word of thanks, the experience of being forgiven, a moment of beauty. ‘Beauty is God’s handwriting, a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every face, sky and flower. Drink it with your eyes; it is a cup of blessing’. (Kingsley)
Advent is about being aware and awake, alive and alert, with eyes to see the presence of God in the ordinariness of life. It redirects us to the source from which we come and to whom we go.