Excerpt from WinterSong
As we move into Advent we are called to listen, something we seldom take time to do in this frenetic world of overactivity. But waiting for birth, waiting for death-these are listening times, when the normal distractions of life have lost their power to take us away from God’s call to center in Christ.
During Advent we are traditionally called to contemplate death, judgment, hell, and heaven. To give birth to a baby is also a kind of death — death to the incredible intimacy of carrying a child, death to old ways of life and birth into new-and it is as strange for the parents as for the baby. Judgment: John of the Cross says that in the evening of life we shall be judged on love; not on our accomplishments, not on our successes and failures in the worldly sense, but solely on love.
Once again, as happened during the past nearly two thousand years, predictions are being made of the time of this Second Coming, which, Jesus emphasized, “even the angels in heaven do not know.” But we human creatures, who are “a little lower than the angels,” too frequently try to set ourselves above them with our predictions and our arrogant assumption of knowledge which God hid even from the angels. Advent is not a time to declare, but to listen, to listen to whatever God may want to tell us through the singing of the stars, the quickening of a baby, the gallantry of a dying man.
Listen. Quietly. Humbly. Without arrogance.
In the first verse of Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring, we sing, “Word of God, our flesh that fashioned with the fire of life impassioned,” and the marvelous mystery of incarnation shines. “Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh,” goes one of my favorite propers, for it is indeed the mystery by which we live, give birth, watch death.
When the Second Person of the Trinity entered the virgin’s womb and prepared to be born as a human baby (a particular baby, Jesus of Nazareth), his death was inevitable.
It is only after we have been enabled to say, “Be it unto me according to your Word,” that we can accept the paradoxes of Christianity. Christ comes to live with us, bringing an incredible promise of God’s love, but never are we promised that there will be no pain, no suffering, no death, but rather that these very griefs are the road to love and eternal life.
In Advent we prepare for the coming of all Love that love which will redeem all the brokenness, wrongness, hardnesses of heart which have afflicted us.
From Wintersong, Christmas Readings. Copyright 1996 by Madeline L’Engle and Luci Shaw. Published by Regent College Publishing.
Text First Published January 1996
