DARK, HARD, SILENT ----

                                                                                                             advent four



                                                                                                             Dark darker, cold
                                                                                                             colder, movement
                                                                                                             freezes. In night, lighted
                                                                                                             doors close and go
                                                                                                             dark. Streets gleam
                                                                                                             houseless, hard.
                                                                                                             Where is entry?



                                                                                                             Four candles.



                                                                                                             On bare hills, on
                                                                                                             camel roads, something
                                                                                                             has cracked open. Clouds
                                                                                                             reveal stars. Stillness
                                                                                                             is everywhere. A huge
                                                                                                             holds its breath.

ADVENT 4: A GIFT

On the Fourth Sunday in Advent I was at Mass in the rather beautiful village church of Milhars, a cut above most others in the region, perhaps because of the proximity of the large ancient château perched above it. And in the silence following the Communion it occurred to me that each Eucharist repeats the entire story of the Gospel.

At the moment of Consecration, the Incarnation repeats itself. Our Lord and heavenly father, the almighty and everlasting God, again sends his Son to take matter upon himself, et homo factus est in the Body and Blood on the altar.

At the moment of Communion, his preaching life, his healing life, and his crucifixion are compressed into a brief but extraordinarily intense moment: at one and the same time we understand his action, we are healed by his touch, and we crush him in the Host.

And in our subsequent renewal, in our fresh energy of loving, his Resurrection is repeated: our inward life shines with an Easter glory.

This thought is, I am sure, present in the work of mystics and Church Fathers; but in this case it was given to me in a few minutes of quiet, awaiting the Solemn Benediction in a French village church. What a Christmas gift!

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.

GETTING THERE?

    This year, the Fourth Sunday in Advent is also the first day of shortening nights. It’s as if the fourth candle had an infinitesimal but enormous effect: infinitesimal in time (a few minutes), enormous in space (all over the hemisphere). We are approaching Christmas. Are we getting there? Depends where There is, of course. Getting to the end of shopping; getting to the end of decorating; getting (for a few) to the end of fasting and penitence; getting closer to the Nativity; getting closer to New Year’s Eve; getting closer to 2014; getting closer to Epiphany. But is there a There there? What is the fourth candle’s effect on us? 

    There are moments – insomniacs, monks and those on guard duty know them – when dawn has not quite begun, when there is no real light in the East, but when the night no longer smells like night, when there is a strange sense of impending alteration. It is perhaps that sense that our four candles convey. We still need them, to see by, to warm our hands at, to help keep our faith alive and watchful until the Dawn; but the night no longer smells like night, and here and there there is a rustling as of a homeward badger or a waking bird. And so we nod our heads wisely, like the old campaigners we are (or imagine we might be), and murmur, “Getting there”.

And for those for whom Advent, consciously or not, has been a battle on a storm-tossed sea, and who are looking forward to Christmas, or what follows it, or the meaning of it, as a long-desired safe harbour, I’ll add a hymn I wrote last year, to the tune of “Melcombe” (hear it here):

Receive us, Lord, just as we are:

Our wandering feet have led us far

In deserts of the daily round –

Lonely and lost, we would be found.

The songs we sang our lips have lost:

We stand surrounded by a host

Of ghostly troops whose panoplies

Are powdered ash and prancing lies.

Our traitor hearts, each trudging day,

Thoughtlessly throw thy gifts away:

The gifts that meant us only good,

Humble and priceless: paid in blood.

We cannot fight our way to thee

With arms undone by treachery;

Helpless, our torn and ragged soul

Only by thee can be made whole.

Thy love is all we have to trust,

Thy heart more merciful than just

We cling to: we have wandered far –

Receive and free us as we are.