BILLTESKA

Lectionary texts: http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/BAdvent/bAdvent1.htm
Collect: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



Sleep and Waking: our two natural states of mind, the yin and yang of consciousness. But the Gospel advises us to keep awake and forget about sleep. Monks used to take this literally, getting up in the middle of the night to pray. Some ascetics try to restrict their sleep as much a possible. My starets’ own starets, St. Silouan of Athos, used to sleep only two hours a day – sitting up in a chair! This kind of literal, prodigious vigilance is not for everyone, not for the all of our Lord’s command. And when we think of trying to fulfill it literally, we rapidly conclude that it’s just impossible – like cutting off offending hands or plucking out roving eyes – and we tend to just forget about it. We will try to pray and to give thanks and to give to those who ask of us, but stay awake? I don’t think so. As long as we think of natural sleeping and waking as the two modes of consciousness, we will downgrade the importance of vigilance.

But of course the Lord’s command refers to something else, something more than natural sleeping and waking. It is a metaphor, I suppose, but a special kind of metaphor. It points to the mystical fact that our human consciousness is potentially unlimited. Normal sleeping and waking are not all that we are capable of. There are dimensions of consciousness that are to ordinary waking consciousness as waking is to sleep. Our consciousness is open-ended, like the winter sky on a clear, cold night.

I always feel that at this time of year the world isn’t just shutting down, hibernating, going to sleep, because at the same time the sky never seems to vast or so close. The Reality of the infinite is somehow nearer. Yes, it is darker, but that only makes the stars more brilliant, and heaven more full of them. Heaven seems closer, about ready to rip open and come down. We even call the One Who is Coming Oriens – the Dawn or Day-spring (my favorite apostrophe of the Great O Antiphons). We will behold His coming only if we stay awake and watch for it, which brings us back to vigilance.

In part, it simply means attention. Attention to God, as opposed to distraction. In a sense, that is what sin is, willful distraction. Missing the mark by failing to pay attention to it. And so attention, the remembrance of God, is indispensable. But it is, perhaps, only the first rung on the ladder of vigilance. Staying up all the time may be one way to do it, but real vigilance – the supernatural consciousness beyond sleeping and waking – is something even greater: as far beyond mere concentration of attention as the infinity of the fiery galaxies is beyond our beloved little Earth. It is that consciousness we are called to by our Lord’s command to stay awake.

We cannot imagine such a thing. (It would be easier to stay awake twenty-two hours a day!) But we can imagine the possibility, in the same way that we can look into the infinity of the winter sky and imagine the possibility of countless galaxies and worlds. The great thing is to imagine not that we are going there, but that there is coming here. That is what Advent is about. The heavens are about to be wrent; the inconceivable is about to happen. Now, ordinary consciousness – sleeping and waking – cannot expect the inconceivable (flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God). But we can expect it in the vigilance commanded by the One Who is Coming. He is the fire to the brushwood of our consciousness, causing the water of our souls to boil, which is not so much an image of destruction as of transformation: dead wood exploding in light, inert water bubbling into living steam. Without that expectation, all our pursuits in life are futile, distractions, missing the mark, the works of darkness. With it, everything is clothed in light and fire, the armor of light. The expectation that shortly He will rend the heavens and come down changes everything.

The calling to vigilance is not a calling to leave the world and go to the stars: not the development of our inner life to the point where we leave the world behind. It is not a matter of our going somewhere else, but of Heaven coming into this world, of Light shining in darkness, of God’s rending the heavens and coming down, of Advent. The transformation of our consciousness from the natural yin and yang of sleeping and waking into this supernatural hope is not just for our comfort and benefit; it is the first stage in the transformation of the world, which is being created anew, reborn in light and fire, just as the Sun appears to be reborn on the darkest day, the day on which we address Jesus Christ as Oriens, the Source of Light and the Light itself.