He will come like child

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. Isaiah 11:1

I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. Luke 2: 10b-12

Boldness and vulnerability

Rowan Williams poem Advent Calendar finishes with this stanza:

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Redemption comes with a struggle. The journeys of the Advent story’s characters are filled with dangers and threats. Yet at the centre is God, come as a baby.

The Christ child comes, like every other child, to give the world a message wrote Anthony de Mello. What is God’s message in the shape of this baby?

Later in his life Jesus stated that he came not to judge the world but to save it. The one true image of God is Christ crucified write a number of commentators. Maybe such love, boldness, conviction and vulnerability is echoed here in a similarly dramatic and poignant context.

Questions

What am I afraid of?  What qualities of God opens me up to God?

Come close?

In the sixth month, Gabriel the angel was sent from God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man called Joseph, from the family of David. The virgin was called Mary. ‘Greetings, favoured one!’ said the angel when he arrived. ‘May the Lord be with you!’ - Luke 1:26-28

He did not wait till the world was ready,
till men and nations were at peace.
He came when the Heavens were unsteady,
and prisoners cried out for release. - First coming, Madeleine L’Engle

On readiness, preparedness 

I don’t know ready Mary was for this visit. Often it seems that anxiety erupts when we are caught unawares. I can feel exposed due to a surprise or change. I can’t quite marshall my defence, my resources, quickly enough or at all.  Maybe there is help here for us…

‘Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy’, writes Abraham Joshua Heschel.  The Trappist monk and activist Thomas Merton added ‘It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed.’  

Do I feel I am enough, as I am, or that I have to do or be something more?                    

 The tender scene between Mary and the angel is a vital expression of how God’s action works with us, not against us; not over-ruling us but enabling us to be who we are. Henry Ossawa Tanner shows us Mary as troubled and uncertain but looking directly into the angelic light; there is a real dialogue of respect going on here. - The art of advent, Jane Williams

To what extent have I appreciated the mutuality that is offered and sought?  What impact does that have on me – any changes, surprises, any shifting in your relational dynamics with God? There is respect and there is consent. There is distance and there is intimacy. I wonder to what extent I feel I am a ‘free agent’ and that my personality matters when it comes to relating to God?                     

God comes disguised as our life

All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural ordinary things.  Thomas Merton

Looking towards rather than away from life

God comes disguised as our lives, as Joan Chittester puts it. As work (Zechariah was on duty, ‘serving’), as complying with authorities (Joseph went to Bethlehem because of a census requirement), as family drama (meeting and greeting friends, a la Mary and Elizabeth) and of course as giving birth. We are to look towards rather than away from life. Maybe there are still remnants of an only Sunday God, an only In a church building God, not a ‘we live, and move and have our being in Him’ God?

God and the fabric of life

Edwina Gateley’s writings are sprinkled with such comments: “I do not need to seek God. God is already here waiting to be found, soaked in my reality. My journey is be one of recognising God, always, already present, and surfacing, that presence in my daily life.” Kathleen Norris witnesses to this in her quotidian writings, Etty Hillesum in her ‘Life interrupted’ . Life is not necessarily where we expect or want it to be. Life is lived in the gaps, write others. Of Thomas Merton Esther de Waal writes that ‘he points us to the places in which to look for God, and shows us that those places are there in front of us, right where we are’. J Philip Newell in his writings on Celtic christianity repeats the line that the sacred is not separate from the ordinary.

God it seems weaves Herself deeply into the fabric of life, in birth and in death. Emmanuel is God with us, a central message in the Advent narratives.

Question

Where in my day, life, insides do I see God, want to see God?

He comes like last leaf's fall

hIS DIVINE NATURE CLEARLY SEEN

There is a long history of thought around natural theology, about the place and presence of creation in relation to the nature of God.  “Sacred writings are bound in two volumes—that of creation and that of Holy Scripture. ” wrote Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century echoing Paul’s words in Romans 1:20.  Jesus readily draws on nature in his parables: the kingdom of God is like…

So what space is there in us for receiving God through nature, experiencing the Holy Spirit via a resonance between our external world (what we see and observe for instance) and our internal world (what we understand and feel)?

In his poem Advent calendar Rowan Williams sees God coming ‘like last leaf’s fall’, ‘like frost’, ‘like dark’, tracking the progress of the earth from November through to December.

How might each of these similes shape our view on how God comes to us and where God might come to us?  Here’s a smattering of phrases that come to me.   What are yours?

He comes like last leaf’s fall

In the cusp before a full change, to denuded and empty.  In falling or descent. In sinking into the present moment? In the edge or the final straw.  In Elizabeth and Zechariah, the old turning to the new. In endings, of silence (after the intertestamental period) and of despair? In the last moment.

He comes like frost

As covering, layering.  As light sprinkling.  As delicate beauty.  As awe. Extensive: For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord; it shall cover them as water. (Habakkuk 2:14).  Revealing shapes and highlighting forms, one of Zechariah’s drives perhaps (“How can I be sure of this?”)

He comes like dark

With mystery, somewhat shrouded, ineffable? With pinpricks of light, a blanket of stars. The cloud of unknowing. Zechariah is rendered speechless.