Category: Advent

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
as of old on earth he stood,
Lord of lords in human vesture,
in the Body and the Blood
he will give to all the faithful
his own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of Light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the powers of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.

At his feet the six-winged seraph;
cherubim with sleepless eye,
veil their faces to the Presence,
as with ceaseless voice they cry,

"Alleluia, alleluia!

Alleluia, Lord Most High!"

Just listened to Christian Forshaw's arrangement of "Let all mortal flesh keep silent", from his CD Sanctuary. Each time I read these words, listen to them sung, and especially the last Sunday in Advent, I'm left with a sense of wonder, awe and a feeling of convictional contentment. The Incarnation rightly understood, and properly expressed in beauty of image and precision of language, is a doctrine profound in its truth of the self-giving Triune God.

Convictional contentment is light years away from convictional certitude, or faith as ideological imperialism, or faith that as the complacency of the dominant has lost its sense of historic humility and rootedness in the nature of the God who comes. By using the phrase I mean an inner sense of fittingness, a way of thinking about God that is inexhaustible in truth and inexpressible in words, and thus yields a profound allegiance of heart to that glory which is full of grace and truth.

Content to live my own life on the conviction that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us

Content to be a practitioner of reconciliation on the conviction that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself

Content to live in the joy, the peace and the hopefulness that is in Christ, on the conviction that joy, peace and hope are the will of God for the fractured reality that is our world.

Content then to embody the conviction of God incarnate in Jesus, in a life that likewise reaches out in love, resists injustice, models forgiveness, pursues peacemaking, encourages laughter, accompanies the lonely, welcomes the other, receives in grace the service of others, and is open to the will of God in trustful hope.

Content to live the conviction, to follow after Christ by the grace of God and in the power of the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts as unreliable as my own, and as unworthy.

The words above are from the Liturgy of St James, and carry within them theological immensity. The image is from the Hubble telescope and give a sense of vastness as beauty. The track from the CD combines organ, human voice and saxophone, three sounds in triune harmony. Coming at the end of the Daily Office of the Northumbrian  Community they leave me with what I have tried to describe, the contentment of faith, rooted in the conviction that the God who comes is the one known in Jesus Christ, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

End of Semester. Marking and grading, composing feedback that builds up rather than tears down.

Meetings. The kind that make you want to live longer with more energy, and the kind that sap the will to live.

To do lists. Unrealistic in length, unhealthy in guilt production, so unlikely to be done.

Too much sitting, talking, desk addiction, computer and mouse attachment like umbilical cord or intravenously administered information.

Need exercise. So last night spent a while on the exercise bike listening to a Christmas CD with some wonderfully therapeutic music. One track in particular, Gesu Bambino, sung by Luciano Pavarotti. Made me slow down.

Which brings me to an odd observation I want to make and then think about. One of the best Christmas presents Sheila and I ever received came two or three years ago. Couretesy of our daughter Aileen. Two tickets for Pavarotti live at the Glasgow Exhibition Centre the following July. I don't mind telling you. The best part of £200 for them, and considerable online activity to get the pick of the best seats. Then we heard Pavarotti was ill with cancer, and soon the concert was cancelled. Later Pavarotti died and our chance was gone. So we never got to use the tickets. And know what? In one very important sense it doesn't matter that we didn't get to hear one of the finest voices in our lifetime. What mattered is that the gift was given, the intention was clear, a once in a lifetime chance and no expense spared. Of course we were disappointed. But these two tickets had already worked their magic; they'd said important things every parent needs and wants to hear.

So. How important is the actual gift, compared to the love and kindness and intent that thought up the idea, and made it happen? Sitting there sweating away on the exercise bike, listening to the voice we nearly heard live, not for the first time I was reminded of the sacrament of generosity, within and beyond our families.

And the quite remarkable and unsettling thought that generous intention and costly expense are themselves the gift – the giver is the gift, and the gift itself merely the evidence of that which represents value of a higher order.

Och Christmas. A lot of sentimental nonsense, just a time for rational calculation to give way to uncalculating extravagance in the good cause of the other person.

In other words, the gift of Christ was never meant to make sense in any way we can get our own heads round. A time for the foolishness of generosity, an opportunity to say things too easily left unsaid, and to do it in ways that lack ambiguity. The generous act is a relational statement – which amongst other things is why when we think of God's coming amongst us in the gift of the Word made flesh, we are confronted with self giving love, making itself real, and known, as gift.

When I look at your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

human children that you care for them?

Psalm 8.3-4.

Psalm 8 is one of my favourite stopping places when I feel small and need to regain a sense of proportion. Incredulity is an important and deeply Christian spiritual attitude, an essential prerequisite for that intellectual humility in which wonder and curiosity flourish. I suppose there is something called an ecology of the spirit, a disposition of the heart, a mind habitually receptive, a way of seeing that is patiently and faithfully interested, and not surprised at being astonished. In fact that might be the phrase I prefer as descriptor for a Christian worldview, one who is unsuprised at being astonished.

Reading the poetry and diary of Rebecca Elson, whose faith commitment was more an intellectual faithfulness to truth than an identifiable religious devotion, I have come to recognise a quality of mind that is deeply congenial to a Christian Advent theology. Those who confess "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth", make the kind of statement that means that for the rest of their lives they will be unsurprised at being astonished. The amazed stargazer of Psalm 8 makes the same connections between a majestic universe and human fragility. So when I first read this from Elson's diary, it set me thinking once again about stars, the importance of perplexity and frustrated intellect as the context for thinking about what it means to speak of our fragility and the mindfulness of God in the one breath, and to speak of incarnation, the Word made flesh:

"Wind moving the branches of the trees. Strange how warm for November. Hit possible to take this for granted? What does it mean? Monday morning. Wake up, dress, eat breakfast, set off on my ratlling old bicycle, through the Grafton Centre, across the common to the black iron footbridge where the swans are waiting to be fed, past Castle Hill, through St Edmund's Gardens and up to the old stone walls of the observatory building. Put up a picture on the screen of part of a small swarm of stars seen by a telescope that hundreds of people, using the accumulated knowledge of thousands of thinkers, put into orbit around our planet. Think about what it means. What does it mean? And is it just, in the end, a discipline like anything, like building brick walls, or balancing accounts, or sitting at an altar in a pose of meditation? This is what I practise, practise it with compassion, with honesty, with dignity, with dedication to some ideals."   (Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe, page 102)

"Think about what it means." That isn't only an intellectual imperative, it is a spiritual summons, an insistent call from deep within the miracle of our own mortal humanity, an invitation to astonishment, to see what infinity might look like, if only we could see. This woman who wrote of swans and stars, of bicyles and telescopes, of balancing accounts and scrutinising the night skies, is like a secular Psalmist. She wants to know, "What does it mean?" It is a good Advent question. And part of its answer is in that other question, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?" Unsurprisingly, I'm astonished at the answer.

During her last months of her illness, Rebecca Elson wrote in her notebooks, thinking her way towards whatever meaning her life could be given. Her editors describe how and why she wrote:

"She wrote in pencil, legibly and freely, drafting and redrafting poems, stories and essays. She would tackle a difficult idea again and again to clarify its expression. Among these entries, she developed the habit of making verse notes, a discipline of observing and exploring, written at speed directly into the book. Occasionally she would draw on one of these entries to inform a poem, but most remain as they were first written — fresh, unguarded, illuminated by their own discovery."

The second half of A Responsibility to Awe consists of selections from those notebooks, the last entry written 9 days before she died. Reading them now you become aware of a mind that did not miss much, and yet wasn't gratuitously grasping. Intellectual avarice corrupts the soul of the scientist, and Rebecca Elson demonstrates in her poetry and her science rare gifts of intellectual generosity, of respect for what is, of curiosity that is never mere lust for factual certainties. The notebooks contain humour and wistfulness, regret and playfulness, engaging with existential dilemmas and deconstructing everyday routines.

Here are two brief entries in which the image of stones, – stepping stones in a river and stones placed on a mountain cairn, open in her mind sluices of uncertainty so that her "sureness falters."

Life a la carte, and why not, order it up

Not really understanding anything

just skimping across the surface

Like going upstream on stepping stones

You don't really know the meaning of river.

Cold wet feet, a current against you

You might get there, but you haven't understood.

So many stones

Building a cairn on a mountain top

Where few will go

I lift & place my few stones

And the wind and snow might knock them down

My sureness falters…..

The vulnerability and uncertainty of these lines is deeply moving, written a year before she died. Reading them during Advent invites an acknowledgement that this season of expectation, of hopeful looking forward towards the light, is not within reach of everyone's experience. There are those who feel they have nothing much to look forward to. There are those who, looking into the next few weeks and months, feel that their sureness falters. I've often felt that the great exhortations of Hebrews have a place in the Advent lectionary – "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard becuse of his reverent submission." (Heb. 5.7)

The risk of human birth, the contingency of growing up, the not knowing until incarnation the glory and frailty of human flesh, and yes, those times told in our Gospels when, even for Jesus, perhaps especially for Jesus, sureness falters. I don't see Advent as triumphalist denial of human suffering, but as a call to hopefulness for all of us when, like the Word made flesh, sureness falters. And perhaps the call of God to us this Advent, is to notice those around us who bring their stones to the cairn where wind and snow might knock them down – and to stand there with them as their sureness falters.

The photo used is from the site http://www.rogerwendell.com/hiking.html with thanks for its use.

Today I am publishing at Hopeful Imagination over here. This is an Advent Blog convened by Andy Goodliff and contributors are mainly Baptist but that means quite diverse – age, gender, theological style, vocational context, height…..well most of them are bigger than me :)).

No overall theme other than some reflective and theologically alert folk thinking about Advent, the state of our world, and the Gospel as the place where the God who comes and the world that waits, coincide.

My post at Hopeful Imagination today is "Advent – to wrest with mystery, and rest in mystery."

I continue to read slowly, the poetry of Rebecca Elson, against the backdrop of the great Advent reveille, "Arise! Shine! Your light has come!"

During Advent I'll be reading the poems of astronomer and poet the late Rebecca Elson. The story of the obliging star and the gullible peripatetic Magi is an embarrassment to those whose religious reach can't get beyond verifiable empirical facts captured on digital camera. To anyone who has a sense of scale and the cosmic vastness of things, and for whom existence isn't measured by the arithmetic of the ordinary but by that capacity to be surprised which is a necessary presupposition for the deepest kinds of human knowing, to such people, stars and Advent are mutually referential, shedding light on each other.

"Arise! Shine! Your light has come!" God knows, our world needs light, and yes, a guiding light that tempts us to follow to the place where promises are fulfilled, where human life is redefined, and where fragility and danger do not stop hope from being born. Amongst the wise assumptions of the ancients, was awareness of the limit of human intelligence, and that awareness of limit the opening for a more adventurous epistemology. Well anyway, here's an Advent poem, not from Rebecca Elson this time, but from U A Fanthorpe's Collected Poems.

The Wise Man and the Star

The proper place for stars is in the sky,

Lighting the whole world but negotiating only

With the highly qualified – master mariners, astro-physicians,

Professionals like ourselves.

This one came unscheduled, nudged us roughly

Out of routine, led us a wild-goose chase,

And perching here, above unspeakbale rafters,

Common as a starling on a washing line,

Whistles to every calllow Dick and Harry,

Idling amazed around: "OK pals, I've done my bit.

Over to you now, Earth."