A recurring theme in Blessed John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Hominis is the wonder we should have at ourselves and who God is. He goes on to say that to be Christian is to be formed by the gospels and to be called to ‘amazement’ (n.10). He reiterates it again in his final encyclical on the Eucharist (n.5)   because the Eucharist is the concrete pledge that the same incarnate and redeeming divine presence is with us today.  Amazement, gratitude and surrender are the fundamental Christian attitudes.  One does not know God by climbing the greasy pole of merit and acquisition.    The God of the Hebrew Bible and the Father of Jesus is always an otherness to whom we are drawn as a needle to a magnet because it is he who first draws us through his Word.  Since it is God who initiates the relationship, he is always known in the receptivity of faith. Patrick Kavanagh got it right in his poem Advent.  He saw the ‘Advent-darkened room’, the ‘dry black bread’ and ‘sugarless tea’ as a necessary purification in order to charm back the luxury of a child’s soul, the soul capable of amazement.

The Church traditionally recalls for us three comings of God in Christ during Advent. The first two from the Patristic tradition are Christ’s coming in HISTORY, a coming in the flesh in which he bore the Cross (our Redemption), and the second, his coming in MAJESTY at the end of time (which presages personal death and final human destiny). And lest we limit these comings by seeing them only as punctual moments in time, having no bearing on   daily life, St. Bernard, in a later century added another – Christ’s coming in MYSTERY. He called it God’s ever-with-us presence in ‘rest and consolation.’

We may find that the readings evoking the majesty of Christ’s coming (Lk 21:25-28, 34-36 of First Sun. C) interrupt the flow of Advent.  Language about the Day of the Lord springing upon us like a ‘trap’ (or as in 2Pet. of Second Sun. B, like ‘a thief in the night’) can appear out of context, and may even frighten us.  We ask what has this to do with the birth in Bethlehem for which we are preparing? Is it that God is ‘trapping’ us or issuing a warning the he will catch us out in death?  I do not think so. Death is not a divine threat or a punishment; it is a natural reality for all of us flesh who are ‘grass’ as the psalmist says.  And we also know that despite its reality we are never ready. We are never ready because   the final coming of Christ in  death, ushered in by ‘signs in the sun and moon and stars’ is a signature  of the sheer otherness of the divine  who comes to us, and we are never ready for otherness.  God’s presence will always surprise us, and in relation to him we will be opened to unexpectedness, to newness and to ‘power and great glory’ as the biblical language says.

And in the coming in history we are called to ever greater amazement. For religious believers other than Christian it is considered unseemly that the human and the divine should be found  so easily in each other. (From earliest times theologians have called this ‘the scandal of particularity’).  Now we know that there is a ‘where and the when’ to the coming of our God.  He is with us in the body-person of  Jesus the Jew of Palestine. The most mystical of the evangelists, John, whose writings were concerned with the mystery of the Word made Flesh, knows that in the Incarnation a bridge has been crossed.  The flesh, physicality and the world has been consecrated, and the evangelist shows his amazement with the language of sight, hearing and touch:

Something which has existed
since the beginning,
which we have heard,
which we have seen with our own eyes,
which we have watched
and touched with our own hands,
the Word of Life – this is our theme.
1Jn 1:1

What more could have been given to us?  As we say with the Christmas liturgy – O admirabile commercium.  Despite our regrets about the extravagance of Christmas in our times, can we not say that it is the impulse of gratitude and amazement that lies behind the bright lights and décor, the family gatherings, the sumptuous food and drink, the generous giving of gifts, the desire that nobody be excluded in the remembrance during the season of those who have not.

Because of the Incarnation we need not look to the extraordinary, the spectacular, or miraculous to find God. It is as if the Incarnation is the sacrament, the peak point and pledge of all divine presence in the world. Because of the Incarnation the Divine is always present in Mystery now.  The Mystery is Emmanuel – God-with–us, in our kitchens, at our tables, in our work, business and politics, in each other’s faces and above all in our Eucharistic celebrations. The world is no longer an alien place and neither  are our experiences for despite our confusion and woundedness ‘we can’ as St. John of the Cross says ‘go there because Christ has been there.’

We are, as the poet Mary Oliver says in her poem: When Death Comes – brides ‘married to amazement.’ The stark recollection of death for the poet was to turn her with greater urgency to the world – so dear in all its detail and she welcomed it into her arms. In reflecting on the coming of the Son of Man in Majesty, in marvelling at the birth in Bethlehem, our minds are being tuned to a certain way of seeing and we turn to where we find the divine mystery now – in the world and our daily lives. And so as not to miss out, Luke gives us some Advent advice:  ‘Watch yourselves or your hearts will be coarsened with . . . the cares of life. . . Stay awake praying at all times. . .’

For he is always newly come
And newly dear
The ages long.

Alice Meynell

Jo O’Donovan rsm
South Central Province