KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 28 November
Where shall wisdom be found?
Job’s words speak wonderfully to the whole meaning of the Advent season. They embrace and comprehend the other two readings in Chapel this week from the Prophet Micah and from the first Chapter of John’s Gospel. Our School Prayer begins with these words: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. As I write this I am listening to William Boyce’s lovely motet on this passage. The main point of the passage goes to the very nature of religious philosophy. All wisdom is of God.
The Genesis stories of creation and the fall provide the foundational and formative features of classical spirituality. There is nothing outside of the Word and Will of God, no reality not comprehended by God’s speaking all things into being and as such upholding them in their truth and meaning. This is why the tradition of the early Church theologians in preaching on the work of the six days to those preparing for Holy Baptism is so crucial; there are sermons and treatises from both eastern and western thinkers and a host of later commentaries on Genesis. Everything is embraced in the loving wisdom of God including the wilderness, the wilderness that is really us in our turning away from paradise. We are the wilderness but Paradise is always there. We cannot unmake it or make it for ourselves. It is folly to think that we can, though there is no end to the utopian attempts to do so over many, many centuries, including our own . But to know ourselves in the wilderness is to be recalled to paradise yet only “to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot put it in Little Gidding, Four Quartets. And that means that it is no longer simply a beginning but our end in God.
Advent season is one of the loveliest seasons of the Christian year. It signals the profound theme of God coming to us in Word and Light and, ultimately, in the Christian understanding as “the Word made flesh”, Jesus Christ, true God and true man. God’s Word comes in Law and Prophecy and Gospel. That word comes as love, the love which is the fulfilling of the Law not its extinguishment. Love is its perfection that marks the shift from the wilderness, the place of law, to the paradise of love. Advent presents us with a whole host of images about our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in the wilderness and in the via, the way, to our patria, the homeland of spirit, of paradise. It offers the vision and hope of wilderness transformed into paradise.