The Sauntering Pilgrim

Advent is an awkward, unsettled, ambiguous season. Retail Christmas decorations pop up as early as midsummer, and Christmas music starts filling the airwaves in November. The Hallmark Channel runs Christmas movies year-round. In churches, the urge to decorate for Christmas and sing Christmas music starts as soon as Advent begins. And in our homes, some treasured family decorations and traditions have already made their appearance.

We’ve largely lost the necessary tradition of observing Advent as a season of emptying and of penitential waiting for what is to come. Some still know it as a “little Lent,” but few observe it that way. Our culture tries to whip us into a frenzy of over spending, over eating, and over scheduling, but Advent invites us to slow down and consider when we are and what we’re doing. It invites us to give attention to a deeper yearning that won’t be satisfied with mere decorations.

One mid-December years ago, I was heading home after spending the day in Midtown Manhattan. It was the height of rush hour, and to avoid the crowd of shoppers and commuters at the Port Authority I decided to attend the 5:15 Mass at St. Patrick’s. As I turned to cross the street, surrounded by what seemed millions of people all heading in the opposite direction, I became aware of one fellow who drew up sharply, turned as if to reorient himself, and said, “God! Where’s everybody going?”

Advent is a season to stop and ask where everybody’s going. Where am I going? What kind of messiah am I going to meet? Am I rushing to remember a sweet baby wrapped in swaddling cloths lying in a manger? Or am I going to meet the Rex Tremendum with nail-pierced hands and sleepless eye? How do I celebrate the birth of a messiah 2,000 years ago and remain open and vulnerable to the Magnum Mysterium who will surprise me like a thief in the night, when my lamp is low on oil and I’m nodding off?

The questions are not really about Advent, of course; they’re about life, the kind of life Jesus said he came to offer – abundant life, life in all its fullness, “more and better life than [we] ever dreamed of” (John 10:10 The Message) – but that seems just beyond reach. We’re in the place theologians describe as “already and not yet.” A messiah has come, and little seems to have changed. Abundant life has been promised, but when do we get it? We’ve been baptized with water, but what about the baptism with the Holy Spirit John talks about (Mark 1:8)? When does it happen? When will the promise of life be fulfilled? What more can I do to get there?

We want answers to those questions, good answers, trustworthy answers, life-changing answers. Early in my faith journey, when I had been to seminary and knew the right commentaries to read, I believed I came close to having those answers. I’m no longer so sure. Maybe Rilke was right: “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet).

Someone reminded me recently, it takes two years to learn to talk and another sixty or more to learn to be silent. It takes a long time to learn to sit with life’s important questions in silence and honor them by letting them have their way. It takes a long time and some divine patience to sit in the “already and not yet” and resist glomming on to the quick, easy answer.

But the answer is there or will come, usually in the form of some deep, wordless response. It will calm our troubled hearts in the midst of the storm and give us the peace that surpasses all understanding (Phil. 4:7). Or it will make us tremble, and make the sand on which we have built our house give way (Matt. 7:24-27) and shake us loose from complacency and satisfaction with the status quo. And we will know what the second baptism is about, the one with the Holy Spirit.

St. Paul knew that second baptism. He had been well trained in his faith and was confident he knew God’s will, and he was deeply committed to doing it. Then he decided to go to Damascus, and there on the road he was literally knocked on his butt by the realization that he didn’t know as much as he believed he knew. His capacity to hear God’s voice expanded far beyond his education, expectations, and experience, and he was given new sight (Acts 9:1-22).

John Wesley was well into establishing the Church of England revival that would become the Methodist Church when he famously had his own baptism with the Holy Spirit. He wrote in his journal: “In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. . . . [W]hile he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death” (Journal, 24 May 1738).

On the other hand, sometimes enlightenment comes slowly, over a lifetime. In writing his first book, German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was so certain he had solved all the problems of philosophy, he never published another book. After his death, his executors discovered the manuscript for a second book that often directly contradicted his first book. In that unpublished manuscript, he wrote that “the author of [the first book] was mistaken.”

 “God moments” such as St. Paul and John Wesley experienced, such spiritual baptisms, may seem to come unexpectedly and suddenly, or they may evolve slowly, as they did for Wittgenstein. But most often they come to those who are seeking, those who have opened their hearts to receive something special from God, those whose eyes are open to what is happening all around them. “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv’n! / So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heav’n. / No ear may hear his coming; but, in this world of sin, / where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”