THE yr turns: Advent again. Again, the yearly cycle of the liturgy begins.
The pattern of “our bounden duty, that we must always in any respect times and everywhere give thanks” to the Lord of all may not change, but we modify on a regular basis. As the years repeat their pattern, our perspective is all the time latest. Our journey is not any circle, but a spiral.
Each Advent, lots of us sing Charles Wesley’s hymn “Lo, he comes with clouds descending”. Habituation could make it wearisome. But one evensong, years ago, I heard for the primary time Christopher Robinson’s magnificent descant for the last verse. (We could definitely not have managed it within the village choir at home, after I was still a treble.)
Suddenly, the old warhorse’s drained familiarity from so many past Advents was stripped away: I sat up and took notice. Music can do this — break through the familiar into the unexpected. What you mostly knew, what was worn down by use like a snug old shoe, is suddenly mint-new, an adventure: one other twist within the spiral. . .
Unarguably, Wesley’s is an incredible hymn, filled with good divinity, from an incredible poet. It is, after all, based on the concept of the Second Coming, and even has echoes (in verse two) of the Dies Irae by Thomas of Celano (1185-1260). It is steeped in Wesley’s knowledge of scripture. Its opening puts Jesus’s promise (and warning) in Mark 14.62 into the current tense, and it closes with the last words of the Revelation of St John, of which the Aramaic form — maranatha — was used each as prayer and greeting by the Early Church: “Lord, come quickly.”
It is a hymn that breathes each urgency and awe — and awe may be very near fear, even terror:
Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quantus iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!
(How great shall be the fear and trembling,
How great a Judge is he who cometh,
Strictly to look at all.)
For Advent is just not just the run-up to the (literally unspeakable) mystery of Christmas and the gift of the Word-made-flesh. It is just not just — as for therefore many in our greedy culture — an accelerating spending spree within the diminishing variety of shopping days. It is a time for facing as much as what the approaching of the Lord might mean.
What would the arrival of the Desire of All Nations feel like? I can’t imagine that the Lord’s arrival on our doorstep, knocking to are available in, could be comfortable and cosy, clouds or no clouds. Even Peter, boldest of all of the disciples, was moved to say, “Depart from me, for I’m a sinful man.”
ALL the Gospels show us a person of enormous and frightening authority. All the Gospels appear to insist not on a revolutionary programme for social justice — though which may indeed be a consequence of following the Lord — but on individual encounters. Jesus is all the time engaging with — talking to, difficult, healing — specific people, and all the time handing to them the responsibility, the inescapable need, to reply to his monolithic and frightening clarity and integrity.
To his friends and disciples, he says: “Who do men say that I’m? Who do you say that I’m?” — and they can’t not answer. To the wealthy young man whom he looked on and loved, he said: “Go and sell all you could have and provides to the poor” — the one thing that the young man couldn’t do, and he “went away sorrowing”.
Jesus saw into the center of the Samaritan woman, and — yes — into the hearts of Caiaphas and Pilate. And Caiaphas, poor man, stuck to his politically prudent agenda, while John 19.12 hints that Pilate did have some second thoughts that may need ruined his profession.
So many individuals, like them, cannot throw off the exoskeleton that they’ve made for themselves of received ideas, and assumptions, and custom: their very identity, which holds them like a straitjacket in a jail so familiar that they dare not leave for the unknown.
The whole thrust of the Old and New Testaments is to think the unthinkable, to take risks, to desert the self you already know to seek out the true self — which means trusting in something. Abraham had a promise when he left Ur, but no guarantee; Israel’s journey through those years in Sinai was built on trust — a trust that usually faltered.
“Leave all and follow me” — now, not when you could have sorted out the financial issues, and made sure the lawn shall be cut, and the insurance paid up, and said goodbye to mum, but now! A really hard saying, like those words to the wealthy young man.
So lots of us feel our courage fail, even when we have now, with high hearts, begun the journey, or are well on in it, and we turn away, and weep, like Peter; for even the best of saints could fall. As Bunyan says, “Then I saw that there was a solution to hell, even from the gates of heaven.”
ADVENT must make us ask ourselves whether we have now the courage to not take that way, to not retreat from that last jump into the unknown, back into what we predict we all know.
If we seek the unknown Real, we have now to offer up the well-known Shadow; for we’re afraid of being really loved, often called we’re known, with all of the things that we hardly acknowledge to our innermost selves seen within the cloudless, shadowless light of apocalypse: that revealing of all that has been hidden, that we have hidden. We are afraid of being born again, of the glory that shall be revealed in us. Nobody ever said that growing up was not painful.
And yet this season does lead us up, through our acknowledgment of our darkness and weakness and failure, to the generous joy of a birth. It leads, to not a door in heaven opening and angels blowing trumpets (at the least, not yet), but to an easy cradle holding the Ancient of Days, made weak, helpless flesh like ours — not (as St Athanasius put it) “by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God”.
Our little minds may not understand the load of glory, or the mystery of grace; for the lesser can never comprehend the greater. But, in all its brokenness, God loved his creation to death, and got here amongst us.
In the perplexity that comes with the yearly challenge of Advent, I comfort myself with a saying attributed to that great mystic Meister Eckhart: “If the one prayer you ever say is ‘Thank you,’ that’s enough.”
Just as these darkening days lead towards the solstice and the rumour of the returning sun, Advent does indeed result in eucharist.
Charles Moseley’s latest book, A Joyful Noise: 24 hymnwriters and their times, shall be published in 2024 by DLT.
