Advent
reflection When all has collapsed, mystery can enter
By GERTRUD MUELLER
NELSON
Darkness has covered the land. The
days grow shorter and colder. When the sun appears, it is thin, milky and does
not hang long in the sky. The bare branches of trees grope at the clouds as
though to tear them open and release their loads. It is Advent, and along with
nature, we are a people waiting, groping. Drop down dew, you
heavens, we sing. Let the clouds rain forth the Just One. Let the
earth be opened and bud forth a Savior.
If anxiety against the darkness overtakes us and we shut it out,
then we never know nightfall. We live our lives in the glare of lights and then
we never see God against the backdrop of night. The darkness can elicit in us
longing as holy as the lovers, humility as humble as the rock, hope as wakeful
as the hills, trust as faithful as the stars. Then we begin to see God as God
really is. The darkness of longing, of hoping, of praying and waiting is as
much a part of lifes mysteries as is the light.
In Advent, we are invited to enter the darkness and sit there to
learn from it the lessons we avoid in the light. We adjust our sight to the
night. In the stillness of the dark we make ourselves vulnerable to God. We
call on the mystery waiting to enter the life that has become humdrum, or
depressed, or anxious over many things, or angry at the state of the world and
the disrepair of our lives. The mystery we await is not so much seen as it is a
way of seeing, not so much an object known as a manner of knowing. We prepare
the soil for the fall of dew and seed.
Peter Chrysologus in the fifth century said: God saw the
world falling to ruin because of fear and immediately acted to call it back
with love. God invited it by grace, preserved it by love and embraced it with
compassion.
In womb-like darkness, the seed springs to life. In darkness, out
of sight, mystery takes hold in our flesh and becomes part of our blood and
bone. Rather than rushing about trying to do poor imitations of God, we become
harbors of divine mystery and are asked to bring God to birth into a world that
aches for healing salvation.
This consciousness does not cause us to desert the everyday
interactions we have with our sisters and brothers. It does not negate what is
material and concrete. Rather, it turns to sacredness and symbol, every
experience and human interaction as able to reveal and transform. Instead of
endlessly manipulating and worrying the surface of reality, we have finally
allowed ourselves to reach the heart of meaning.
For many, the events we have experienced this fall have plunged us
into a darkness not of our asking. But that is the wisdom of natures
seasons and the churchs liturgical seasons -- to give us a physical and
spiritual darkness to make sense of the dark experience we just had. We rail at
heaven. We ask: Where is God? And promptly, in its own curious way, the
questions open us to mystery and to grace. In our sudden vulnerability, we
discover horror and beauty almost in equal measure. The horror we engaged
together, but the beauty broke in like endless surprises: Real heroes appeared.
People slowed down. They looked each other in the eye. They cooked and fed and
cleaned and gave of themselves. Families reconciled and embraced. Some shocked
themselves and returned to their churches and linked arms in solidarity before
God. Mystery broke through.
The experience that life is a gift is followed by the anxious
awareness that the gift is not guaranteed. All the indignities and
disenchantment of hostile invasions, of colossal disaster, of suffering, of
loss, of death await us. And all our devices to make life safe -- investing
monies, building up the military, stockpiling antibiotics -- are finally not so
reliable as we thought. When all has collapsed, mystery can enter.
We are, of course, creatures of habit and it will not take us long
to scramble back to our old ways, to emerge from the darkness determined to
grasp what we thought we lost.
Or, because of Advent, we will know that God has given us the
charge to bring mystery to birth in our own flesh, being and action. This is
the end of time. This is the beginning of time. Now is the hour to rise from
sleep. Now is the hour of our salvation.
Gertrud Mueller Nelson is an artist, liturgist and author
of To Dance With God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration (Paulist
Press).
National Catholic Reporter, December 7,
2001
|