SO NOW WHAT?

Four weeks; four candles; four winds; four? Jung said that Catholicism was the most psychologically adequate form of Christianity because it had completed the Trinity (three: unstable, tense, male) with a fourth, and a female: the Blessed Virgin Mary. And today, Advent Four, in the RC church is a reprise of the Annunciation. We are so close to Christmas that one is unsure quite to do with Advent Four. Cranmer’s 1549 Collect simply reprises the whole of lurching, blocked human life and its need for direction:

LORDE rayse up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our synnes and wickednes, we be sore lette and hindred, thy bountifull grace and mercye, through the satisfaccion of thy sonne our Lord, may spedily deliver us; to whom with thee and the holy gost be honor and glory, worlde without ende. 
 

I like the “raise up thy power and come among us”; yet we mustn’t forget that when He did just that it was to an utterly unimportant couple in inadequate lodgings on a winter’s night far too close to the Solstice for comfort of any kind. He did succour us with great might, but surely not as we would have expected. His bountiful grace and mercy did indeed deliver us and will go on doing so; but once again, not the way we’d expect and probably not the way we should have chosen.

He did and does so per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. I have written on that “per” before and may soon do so again; for now, the point is that His intervention on our behalf happens, and only happens, by the mediation of His only-begotten Son, whose birthday we are about to celebrate. Which means that it can come to us only by our focusing our entire being on that person in whom God came into our stupid, fucked-up, messy, criminal world in order to begin setting it right in the only way worth doing.

No, the coup d’état we sometimes long for wouldn’t work. Try to imagine it. There would be mammoth opposition immediately, with media blitzes, tanks, and possibly nukes. No: He looked at what we had made of his experimental little jewel of a planet; He wept; and He decided the only way to rescue us was the hard way. Hard for us; far, far harder for Him. Tiny bit by tiny bit. A million relapses; a million and one gettings-up. Costing, said T.S. Eliot, not less than everything. The point is, He paid the everything first. Doing so, he showed us such staggering, such scary, such disconcerting love that we quickly killed him and have been embarrassed for over 2,000 years since.

As Fr Jean-Kamel said, the good guys among us keep wanting to do something for God. What we have to get used to is that He’s not interested in our gifts: He’s interested in us. He doesn’t want what we can give him: He’s richer than that already. But He wants us. He just wants us to shut up, stop prancing, and let ourselves be loved like the useless, miserable, incorrigible, repellent, only-a-father-could-love-them dickheads we are. And once we get to that remarkable point – knowing we are less than zip, yet flooded with His love -- then we can do something: not for Him, but for the idiot next door, who oddly enough is carrying His image.

Four candles: it’s coming awfully close. Up to us to let it be real: not a rough beast slouching to be born.