Day: December 19, 2021

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”

We have used this text as the basis of our Advent meditations which reach a kind of crescendo on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. The word of God is prophetically signalled in the witness of John who points us to the greater wonder of the Word with us, the Word as light in the various darknesses of our understanding. “He was not that light”, we will hear on Christmas Eve “but was sent to bear witness of that light”. Word as light has been our advent concern and interest.

Sarah Bakewell, in her wonderful and brilliant treatment of the essaies of Michel de Montaigne (wittily entitled, ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’), notes at the outset that “the Twenty-First century is full of people who are full of themselves”. A wonderful aperçu, beginning or opening, it strikes me as having a particular resonance and poignancy for our times. In one way, it is nothing new, and, against Bakewell, the interest in the self as a reflection of the other is not new as something invented by the forms of introspection seen in Montaigne. Yet her remark captures an aspect of our contemporary discontent. Beyond Wordsworth’s “the world is too much with us, late and soon”, we have a world full of those who are full of themselves.

Her opening statement provides an opening to our current concerns and difficulties where we are very much concerned about ourselves in ways that paradoxically undermine ourselves. A world that is full of people who are full of themselves is a world full of empty selves or non-selves, at once narcissistic and nihilistic. Today’s Gospel provides an interesting counter to one of the myriad of forms of self-contradiction in our self-obsessed age. It does so through the witness of John, who in response to being asked who he is,  consistently re-orients the question to the one who is greater than he without whom he himself is nothing. This is truly remarkable and without it we can make little sense of the Incarnation.

John is saying that he is nothing in himself. He is saying that he exists for another. Self and other are not pitted against one another in an endless rivalry and animosity. In a way, we are being reminded of the deeper logic of the law in terms of the inseparable qualities of the love of God and the love of neighbour. Even more, we might say with St. Felicity that “another shall be in me who shall suffer for me because I am to suffer for him”, to which the witness of John points us. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. ‘Another lives in me’ is the counter to our being full of ourselves.

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