We celebrate here in temporality with a view to the eternal birth, which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity, so that this same birth has now been accomplished in time within human nature. What does it avail me if this birth takes place unceasingly and yet does not take place within myself? It is quite fitting, however, that it should take place within me.
-- Meister Eckhart
The Nativity of the Lord has mainly to do with Presence. What we have been waiting for has really been here all along. We were not in Advent waiting for anything for God to do, as if God were taking God's sweet time about it. We were waiting for our souls to relax, focus, adjust, adapt, and emerge into the Truth. We were waiting rather for our own baggage and blinders to drop away to we could see what was always here. We were waiting until we lost our fears, desires, expectations, needs, fantasies, habits, and conventional ways of thinking. We were waiting for the fog to burn off. We were waiting for our imaginations to let go of both our obsession with what has gone before and our infatuation with what will come next.
Our waiting was purposeful, intentional, not inert or inactive. It was a preparatory waiting: at once a self-emptying and a refurnishing. I compare it to prospective parents making room for a new child; a two-fold movement of creating space by moving unnecessary things out, and moving necessary things in. Nesting. We wait by letting go and taking on.
Ego and Empire dominate us by manipulation of two pervasive ideas that are not actually real: past and future. Beginning with the alienation that is a consequence of our mortality, we invent stories that invest meaning by telling us "how we got here" and "where we are going," in time.
But now that time of waiting, preparation, divesting and furnishing is over, for Christ is born in Bethlehem! The Creator is Present, "with us," Emmanu-el. One great hymn describes the Creator's action in time this way: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in him tonight." Past and future are completely reframed for us. Now our attention is not on what we imagine to be ahead of or behind us, but on something that has arrived; it is here and now, "above," "beneath," within, among us.
This is not escapism into either the dreamy pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by or imploded "navel gazing," but an engagement with the Good, True, and Beautiful that is always Present, always "near," always "at hand," which Jesus Christ proclaims and embodies. He is the eternal Presence, the divine Shekinah. He is the Real that is always closer to us than we are to ourselves.
One major problem in the Church is that we waste far too much time and energy looking back and/or looking ahead, and offer too little attention to looking "above," "beneath," or within/among at what is happening here and now. We habitually and reflexively focus on what is not here. Now is the time to open our consciousness to what is present with us.
Jesus says to seek first the Creator's Kingdom and justice (Matthew 6:33), which is within and among us (Luke 17:21), and "at hand" (Mark 1:15).
Thomas Merton affirms this presence when he notes that, "in the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at your disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us." Maybe that little room, which he calls "the virgin point," pointe vierge, is what we have been preparing in Advent; a ready space.
We fritter away our time and energy on trying to "adapt" to the latest dopey and illusory big shiny, entertaining thing going on in the world out there, when everything we desire and need has always been right here, with and within us, in the spark of truth and clarity, at the center of our being. Christ is born in astonishing and scandalous simplicity and poverty, revealing the glory of God shining from that bright point, in and throughout our world. God, is present in the stable of Bethlehem, on the cross of Calvary, and in the shared bread that is his Body... which makes us, the Church, his Body, Christ-in-the-world.
Nothing could be more irrelevant or beside the point than allowing ourselves to be distracted by the imagined "historicity" of its details. The Nativity is about birth, "which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity," now being "accomplished in time within human nature." Within all human nature. Within the nature of every human. "Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today." That's the point.
Today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday. Today. "Now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2b). Nothing less than this is happening in the Incarnation. A vertical bolt of pure light from beyond, welling up within us. Jarring us into the realization of God, the Creator, with and within us, now.
And now... what? If the Creator is born in us today, how do we live as the Creator's agents, messengers, witnesses, and people? For we are Christ-in-the-world.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment