Christmas: The Eternal Now

Zoe and Moses thanking God

 Most of us love Christmas. We all have so many joyful memories of Christmases past, hopes for Christmas this year, and for years to come, God willing.  We delight in so much—or most of us may take delight in these things:  cold, fresh air; snow that blankets and quiets the earth; bright stars twinkling—or dancing if we drank some nog—in the icy-cold December sky; sleigh bells and Christmas carols; trees and homes decorated with lovely lights; children’s faces aglow with expectation and wonder; Santa traveling far and wide in a single night or two (for the Orthodox, he comes for Epiphany in early January); scented candles, cookies and breads baking; delicious dinners lovingly prepared and eaten among family and friends; a baby waiting for milk and loving hugs.  And Mary and Joseph, now in humble statue form, surrounded by their resting creature-friends, receiving with sheer delight the infant Jesus; and the shepherds, the poor of the land, hastening to the stable to behold the Savior who will be “great joy for all peoples.” And for more than 1500 years now, Christmas has been for Christians the Mass of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, humankind’s Savior.

Christmas is all of this, and more: more than words can readily or well express, but which we may feel, or sense, because the More is always pressing in on us.  As T. S. Eliot put it so well in his poetic masterpiece, “The Four Quartets”: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.” Not only the Incarnation of God the Word as Jesus of Nazareth, but the process of Incarnation in every moment:  God infusing human beings with his divine presence.  This process is at least as old as recorded human history, for the awareness of this process forms the decisive spiritual experience of millions of human beings over many centuries and in highly diverse cultures.  The ways to express the inbreathing of God into human consciousness vary highly, but the fundamental experience is what it always was. And what is this experience that we celebrate on Christmas, and at every Mass, and in so many prayers and meditations throughout the world?

The Apostle Paul expressed the fundamental experience of divine Incarnation very well:  “Now I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”  A human being who can embrace and do evil is also capable of receiving God into his heart and mind.  “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me?” Jesus asks his disciple, Philip.  Mystics throughout the ages, and mystical philosophers, have spent hours in silent meditation to experience and then to share in words, in literature, or in art, the incarnational reality: “I AM with you.” 

The birth of Jesus by no means exhausts the meaning and gift of Christmas.  Rather, in Jesus we see the fullness of what every human being is and can be. We see humankind in the light of divine reality:  here, now, in every moment, “I AM with you to deliver you.”  Our hearts can take renewed hope, our spirits soar with joy, because the LORD God is dwelling in and with His people.  What has been true for centuries, now reaches fulfillment and bursts into God’s promise for each and for all.  The senselessness of life apart from God is overcome, as God enters into the life of every human being—even in the unbeliever, the “infidel,” the unworthy, the unscrupulous, the “untouchable,” the “unredeemable.” God has taken into himself every human being, from the moment of conception through death, into eternity.  “God loves us, not because we are good, but because He IS.”  The lover and the beloved become one in Incarnation. This sacred marriage of God and human being is what we celebrate, not only on Christmas, but in every breath we take—whether consciously or not.

Our thoughts return to the manger—the scene first described by the evangelist Luke, then made physical for us in the crèche introduced by St. Francis of Assisi—a man in whom God’s presence could be seen, heard, touched—a man whom animals loved to be near, because they, too, know their LORD:  O magnum mysterium: “O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in a manger!  Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear our Savior, Jesus Christ.  Alleluia!”

                                      Merry Christmas, and God bless and fill us, everyone!

The End Of Advent

We have entered the final few days of Advent, which ends on 24 December with Masses of Christmas Eve and the Christmas Day—which is actually eight days long.  The season of Advent ends in time, giving way to Christmastide.  But the end of Advent—the goal of Advent, its fulfillment—is in God alone. Advent ends in God. What is in God never ends in the sense of passes away.  It is and becomes, and never ceases to be.

Every creature has an end in time, because we have bodies; but our End is God.  Our life’s story ends as the body dies, and is laid to rest in a cemetery, or at sea, or as ashes buried on a mountainside, beneath a lonesome pine.  The story of our life, in the sense of a body enlivened by soul, ends in time;  but in the mind of God, one is alive forever.  In the One who brought us forth from nothing, we who lost ourselves in time, find a home forever.  What else could be the end of our human longings, hopes, knowing, loving, but in God? 

In time, Advent blends into Christmas.  Waiting for God is ultimately fulfilled in eternity, but even as we wait, we do so not in the void of nothing, but in the human condition of in-between.  Into our human lives God is ever sending Himself forth, living in us and with us.  If it were not so, our human lives would be essentially empty and futile, or rather, nothing at all.  All that lives and breathes, and all that exists, does so in God, not in and for itself.  In every moment of one’s life, God is taking flesh, incarnating Himself.  Christmas shows us the essential nature of each moment of our lives:  God being with us, in us, and for us.  Advent ends in God beyond time; Christmas is the celebration of God in time:  “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” 

Together, Advent and Christmas mark our human condition as the in-between:  the time of longing for God, and the time for partial completion.  Christmas is God’s gift in time, for time and for eternity; our celebrations of Christmas pass away in time.  And yet, God’s action is eternal, and the One who becomes flesh in time, is the One who inbreathes each creature for all eternity.  The inbreathing is not of breath, for non-physical beings do not need breath; God’s inbreathing is of life, love, wisdom, peace, and joy.  All of these we celebrate at Christmas in time, and share in forever beyond the limits of time in death.  The One for whom every being hopes, the One in whom all beings have their beginning and their blessed end, is the One who is ever and forever giving Himself freely to each and to all.  This is the true gift of Christmas, and it is for now, for tomorrow, and for ever. 

The One for whom we long and hope is ever the One who is more present, more alive, more real than we are ourselves.  We beings are the little ones whom the Almighty is ever indwelling.  “And when this earthy dwelling turns to dust,” our home is where it always was:  not here in this passing world, but in the heart and mind of God. So bury the body of your loved one where you will, and honor the site where his or her life came to its end in time, but know with wonder and love that the one whom you love is not there, not in that grave, or confined to ashes and dust in the earth, but is forever in God alone, where all begins, and all ends, and begins ever afresh. 

                                            LORD, say to my soul, “I AM your salvation.”

ADVENT: Ready or Not

As soon as Thanksgiving is past, we all know that Christmas is near at hand, and then New Year’s.  These special celebrations all flow together in our minds in what we call “the holiday season,” probably forgetting that “holiday” comes from “holy day.”  Most of us are probably too caught up in time to be mindful of what is genuinely holy, and what is merely passing away, or “secular,” “profane.”  Now it is December, and the Church would have us celebrate the season of Advent, the season of waiting for the “Coming of God.”  God comes and does not come.  Advent is here now, and will be gone in a few rapidly fleeting weeks.  And we may wonder, “Where was God?”

As time flies by, and Christmas draws near, the prayers and Scripture readings at Mass tell us to wait in patience “for the Coming of the Lord,” to wait in prayer, to wait in silence.  Nature itself tells us to be silent and still, as we in the Northern Hemisphere are in the darkest eight weeks of the year.  But our consumer culture, our families, our duties, our habits tell us not to be quiet or still, but to enter into constant busyness and “celebrations.”  We probably do not even consciously feel this tension:  be still and wait in silence; get hyper-busy shopping, celebrating, drinking, eating…. Time just keeps flowing, carrying all things in its wake.  Quoting from Eliot’s “Four Quartets:”   “When is there an end to it, the withering of withered flowers?”  “Ridiculous the waste sad time, stretching before and after…”

We cannot stop the flow of time, although some foolishly try to do so by wishes, dreams, and sundry magic acts.  Time is not our enemy, or evil.  For Time brings ever new possibilities; yes, and in time every moment and every thing passes away.  Time leaves one little time for consciousness, just time to rush around in a dizzying flurry.  How can one break through the passing of time?  Not in time, not in the world—“not in this twittering world.”  How can one become conscious, and live a more wakeful life?  How does a human being break through the chains of bondage to time and passing away?  How does one on his or her way to death enter into life?  These are the great questions of human spiritual life, and they are implicitly raised in Advent, but rarely addressed carefully.  For even the prayers and celebrations of Advent pass away too quickly, leaving but a few fleeting moments for consciousness—if we dare to attend at all.  In the familiar words of St. John of the Cross, “Muero porque no muero.”  “I die because I do not die.”

Letting the waves pass over one’s head, sitting in silence, is the way to die well before dying.  Only by choosing not to attend to the fleeting grindings of time, does one become conscious, awake.  There is no other way.  Or is there?  Pain can be so intense that one has no choice but to have one’s consciousness filled up with pain.  Agony does this:  it rips one’s mind to mind nothing but the overwhelming agony.  And certain mind-altering drugs have the same effect:  they fill one’s consciousness with imagined realities, and make all of the real world seem dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable.  I wish neither pain, grief, nor drugged realities on anyone.  There is a far better way to be ready, to enter into life, even as the body ages in time.  It is a way that celebrations alone, however sacred, cannot do for us.  Not even the most beautiful Advent and Christmas Masses can wake us up, as long as we do not learn to sit still in the emptiness of silence, awake and alert.