Day: November 24, 2024

“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

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