Advent
by
Rev. Tom Thresher
Every year I struggle with Advent.
(Maybe I even say this every year!) What is Advent all
about? Is it about the beginning of the Christmas
shopping season? Is it about waiting to begin singing
Christmas carols? Is it about baking? Is it
about waiting for the birth of the Christ child?
(Wasn’t that 2,000 years ago?) Why is Advent so easy to
pass over in our rush for Christmas?
Before I went to seminary I didn’t even
know there was a time called Advent, and I didn’t even
learn about it
then
until sometime late in my first year. They assumed
everyone knew about it. But I’ll bet if you ask a lot
of folks in the church they don’t really know what it is
about either.
I have the abiding sense that
Christianity is much more than the traditional stories
we tell about it. I have this conviction that the
gospel stories are not so much about Jesus as they are
about you and me. I have the sense that the liturgical
year, which begins with Advent, is more than just an
archaic tradition. I believe that all of these things
are pointing at something deeply profound and important
which has been lost or obscured down through the
centuries. I tend to be quite pragmatic in my faith. If
something doesn’t help me to awaken from the dream we
call life, its not much use to me. Many write off
Christianity as just an old bag of superstitious stuff;
I see it as a jewel encrusted with layers of mud, dogma
and misinformation. And Advent is about the murkiest of
all.
In my perception, the liturgical year is
pointing to the cycle of awakening, the process of
metanoia (turning around), of salvation. It is the
cyclical process of becoming less lost in our minds and
our stories; it is also the story of waking up fully and
completely. And it starts with Advent. For me, a
critical distinction is between Jesus and the Christ.
Jesus was a man who awoke to his Christ essence. It is
the same essence that is in each of us and is fully
accessible in each and every moment. It is utterly
simple, content-less, infinite, empty, and boundlessly
abundant all at the same time. It is not that our
Christ essence is not available to all of us all of the
time, but that we are mesmerized by the content of our
thoughts, our daily drama. Salvation consists in
awakening to our true nature which is the infinite “I am
that I am.” In the sense of the liturgical year as a
process, Advent is the dawning of awakening, the inkling
that the drama we live out in daily life is not all of
life. It points to the awakening in us of our true
essence, the Christ, which is born at Christmas.
Interestingly, this comprehension seems
to be symbolized by the Virgin Mary. Mary is a primary
symbol during Advent, particularly in the Catholic
tradition. And much is made of the virgin birth. In
the progressive Protestant tradition we have made a big
deal out of denying the possibility of virgin birth and
its magical overtones. While this is an important
response to the notion of a literal virginal birth, it
nonetheless misses the mythological, universal,
understanding to which it is pointing. The virginity of
Mary does not point to her physical condition, but is a
symbol of the Divine Feminine, of that which is
infinitely receptive, empty, a void. Water is the
archetypical metaphor of the feminine because it
reaches, without rancor or objection, into the lowliest
place, receives every advance or impulse (the masculine
principle) with perfect equanimity. As such it is the
source of all creation, it is the void from which all
form emerges, and to which every form will return. The
Virgin, in this sense, represents our own true nature,
the emptiness that resides at the core of our being
which is, and can only be, immaculate, untouched, and
pure.
The
emphasis on the virginity of Mary is a reminder that
salvation in the Christian tradition is about a kind of
death, the death of the false self, which is found in
the clear presence of this moment. The clear presence
of this moment arises as we dis-identify with our past,
as we let go of defining ourselves by what we have done,
what people have said about us, and what we have thought
or felt; in other words, when we enter the emptiness
symbolized by the Virgin. That which we call the Christ
emerges, is born from, this profound emptiness. The
Christ is born in us as we release our identification
with our past and allow that which is eternal to emerge.
Or in the words of John the Baptist, during Advent we
are preparing “the way of the Lord.”
