by CCW | 15 December 2023 14:00
Advent is our waiting in the wilderness. We are, perhaps, not so good about waiting, wanting instead the immediacy and intensity of ‘celebratory’ events. That is to forget the meaning of waiting. What is our waiting? It is at once human desire and the divine gift that redeems our desires. Our human desires for this and that thing are radically incomplete and unable to be fulfilled. Our waiting is really prayer; the desire for wholeness and completeness which by definition cannot be fulfilled in ourselves.
What is the wilderness? It is not the external world or a world without us. The wilderness is us. This is the strong message of Isaiah, the most ‘evangelical’ of all the prophets, as some have noted. Looking back and reflecting on the great themes of Creation and the Fall, Isaiah movingly highlights the wilderness within us. “Let me sing a love song for my beloved, … a love song concerning his vineyard,” Isaiah 5 begins. “My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is the wildness in us that makes the wilderness both within us and in our world. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” The question, like so many of the biblical questions, simply calls us to account and bids us reflect upon ourselves in our yearnings and desires. Ultimately what we seek is the absolute goodness of God which is more than what we can completely imagine and yet belongs to all our seeking and desiring.
But Isaiah, as we heard in the Advent Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols, shows us another view of ourselves and our world that stands in complete contrast to the sad and disturbing divisions and polarities of our divided and violent world. Isaiah offers us a picture of Paradise Restored, of the harmony between God and our humanity, the harmony of creation itself as grounded in the Creator. Instead of Nietzche’s will to power which supplants Darwin’s struggle for survival, the wolf and the lamb are envisioned as lying down together, an image of the interplay and interdependence of the natural world that transcends the binaries of distinction but without negating them. That image of Paradise Restored is the symbolic meaning of Bethlehem.
Advent brings us, in the Christian understanding, to Bethlehem. What do we see there except that sense of the harmony and unity of God and our humanity concentrated in the child-Christ, the harmony and unity of man and woman, of adults and a child, of sheep and ass, of shepherds and kings, of rich and poor? The artistic images of Bethlehem all build on that idea of harmony, filling the humble scene with the rich pageantry of all manner of creatures united in God: peacocks and camels, horses and dogs, etc. This all speaks to the angelic theme conveyed to the shepherds and from them to us: “Peace on earth and good will towards all.”
We can of course simply dismiss all this with a cynical shrug and leave ourselves in the endless conflict of opposing ideologies. Or we can ponder its meaning for us in our own hearts to see if there is room in our hearts for peace and forgiveness, for harmony and unity, for joy and gladness. That would mean being awakened to the radical meaning of our waiting in the wilderness.
We do not wait for something to happen. We wait upon what has happened and which belongs to God’s eternal now. God, as the mystical traditions of theology and philosophy note, is like “a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker (Four Quartets) begins with “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning,” embracing something of “the still point of the turning world” for “there is the dance”(Burnt Norton, Four Quartets), the dance of the understanding. For everything “points to one end, which is always present.”
My hope and prayer is that the holy waiting of Advent will bring you to the joys of Christmas, to a sense of wholeness and peace in our souls, to a kind of calm and quiet within that tempers all the hectic busyness of the end of term exams and all the bustle and noise of the festivities of Christmas. May the Blessed One bless us all.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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