AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE INNER MYSTERY OF ADVENT
Detail of stained glass roundel of the advent of Christ, St. Michael’s in Cornhill, City of London. Courtesy of Lawrence OP via Flickr.
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with reality outside and above us…The death by which we enter into life is not an escape from reality but a complete gift of ourselves which involves a total commitment to reality.
–Thomas Merton (from Thoughts in Solitude)
While I was in university, I participated in a group called Communion and Liberation, a Italian Catholic movement created by Fr. Luigi Giussani. In this group, my friends presented to me the idea that to be a Christian means to have an encounter with the Mystery of Christ, that Christianity is not just a set of rules or good feelings, but an event, a meeting both in time and in one’s own life. This was news to me—I was raised a fairly nominal Catholic, with a generally poor understanding of all things Christianity due to years of lackluster Sunday school teachers. It's an idea I’ve returned to time and time again in the past decade; it was a phrasing that had never been given to me before, and it made Christianity compelling.
The choice of these words, “an encounter with the Mystery,” are especially thematic during Advent. “Mystery” comes from the Greek word mystērion, “secret rite or doctrine… consisting of purifications, sacrificial offerings, processions, songs, etc.,” and in the Christian sense it came to mean “religious truth via divine revelation, hidden spiritual significance, mystical truth” (definitions from EtymOnline). This word, when translated into Latin, became sacramentum, a more familiar word additionally describing those physical expressions of God’s love in this world.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the medieval French mystic and founder of the contemplative monastic order the Cistercians, referred to this time of year as the Sacrament of Advent, emphasizing that this is a mystery, an encounter, a physical truth. St. Bernard referred to three different Advents. The first Advent is the Incarnation, and the third is the Parousia (literally meaning “presence”), the Second Coming. But in the middle is the Inner Advent, the event of Christ coming continually into our hearts. This is not an alien concept to the whole of Christianity, and I’m sure we’ve all heard this before, perhaps so many times that it ceases to impress us. This idea, however, was all important to many saints, particularly in the spirituality of the Rhineland mystics, like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen, the idea that Christ must be born, hidden, in our lives. Thomas Merton defines this Advent as, “the special presence of God in the world that fascinates [the mystics] and draws them to Him in meditation upon the Bible, where He is present in His Word and in the light generated by that Word in the heart of the Believer.” (1) This birth of Christ in our hearts is the event that calls us to respond, to be transformed, and it is the event that in turn transforms us. Merton elaborates on this theme by writing, “What is uncertain is not the ‘coming’ of Christ, but our own reception to Him, our own response to Him, our own readiness and capacity to go forth and meet Him.” (2)
This is reality, the coming of God who is Love, the Word made flesh, into the world: the physical reality and event of Christianity. So what does that mean for us to have a fruitful Advent? What does it mean to be vigilant, ready to go forth and meet Christ in an ongoing way? Each moment is an opportunity to do so, whether in prayer and contemplation or in love and compassion for others. We must embrace the realities of both the hardships and the goodness of this world without turning away, and we must respond to them in love. Personally, I can sometimes have a habit of over-intellectualizing Christianity. It’s a way of keeping safe distance, of not wanting to take the plunge and risk being, as the Sufis say, as a moth consumed by flame. I often can be repulsed by the “bloodier” aspects of Christianity: detailed crucifixes, martyred saints, modern saints who endured great, absolutely imaginable suffering. After going through a bit of suffering myself, I realized that those images and stories exist because they are real (though detailed crucifixes will never be quite to my aesthetic taste) and the reality of the Incarnation encompasses every single moment of our human lives. When we are not suffering, someone else is, and that matters to God with God’s whole infinity of being, just as it matters when it happens to us. Because it matters to God, it ought to matter to us, too. This winter in the United States there is hateful legislation aimed at the trans community; an ongoing, nearly forgotten pandemic that continues to threaten and isolate immunocompromised and disabled people; and worsening housing crises in major cities. Even when these hardships aren’t our own, the Inner Advent of Christ in our hearts invites us to treat any of these challenges as if they were our own, as God did for every one of us in the manger and on the cross.
I find Christianity compelling because it is so close to the bone, so visceral. In a world where God is with us, lines are now fluid because God became a poor infant, the King of Kings has been nailed to a cross, and death has been undone. We counter evil and war not by violence but with love. Earthly riches are as good as dust. The world as we think we know it bends and flips over whenever we love our enemies and care for the least among us. There is no need to go anywhere to meet our God, because that God resides in our own hearts and in the humanity of others. Knowledge of God is not declared from the top down; rather God can be “caught and held” simply by love, as the Anonymous contemplative describes in the medieval instructional text, The Cloud of Unknowing .
This is the Inner Advent of St. Bernard, our response to the Fr. Giussani’s “event” of Christianity: whether we choose to embrace this reality, embrace Christ, and by so doing, embrace love. When we embrace this reality of Christ, the light of Christ shines a light on our own humanity, and we need not hide from the dark corners of ourselves anymore. We can be truly honest with ourselves and allow Christ to undo the knots inside ourselves that prevent us from fully loving others and ourselves. We can let go of our rigidity, our desire to keep away from vulnerability. This is not a gift to keep to ourselves; rather, we must then live out our faith through love to others by carrying each others’ crosses. The reality of Christ encompasses all of this, our triumphs and sufferings, in a very real and physical way because all of Christianity is real and physical. When we encounter this Mystery of our Inner Advent, we can catch a glimpse of this and hope to be transformed, because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand right now, the wedding feast is ready for all who will go.
Thomas Merton, “The Sacrament of Advent in the Spirituality of St Bernard,” in Seasons of Celebration, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 61.
Thomas Merton, “Advent: Hope or Delusion?” in Seasons of Celebration, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 90-91.
