BILLTESKA

Lectionary texts: http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/BAdvent/bAdvent2.htm
Collect:
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



The point is that everything will be changed. Everything. Every valley exalted, every mountain and hill made low. Nothing will be as it was. Everything ordinary will be reversed. The crooked straight and the rough places plane. The messengers of God are always trying to get our attention, to stimulate our imagination, to get us to look up, to imagine something new, to stop staring at the ground and to look up to the sky, to wake up. They prepare the Way of the Lord by insisting that we think anew, by warning us to think again, to re-pent to think the unthinkable.

Advent is a penitential season, but it is not exactly the same kind of penitence as Lent. It is not about overcoming our deathly preoccupation with ourselves, exactly, it is about getting us to imagine more. The purple of Advent is trimmed with gold: royal as well as mournful. I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. The purple of Advent is tinged with fire.

One way of looking at it is to think of the Baptism of John as like throwing cold water on sleepers in order to wake them up. The “Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” may be understood as a sign of willingness to think anew, washing away every distraction and preoccupation that causes us to miss the mark of remembrance of God. John’s Baptism prepare(s) the Way of the Lord by opening our consciousness to the Infinite. This means that we have to relinquish our attachment to things as they are – and to our most cherished notions of our own identity.

Things are not as they seem, and we are not who we think we are. Reality is much more than meets the eye. Human history is not the endless, meaningless cycles of rising and falling tides, waxing and waning moons, and alternating seasons. Neither is human life an endless succession of birth, death, and rebirth. Some find comfort in such notions, but Advent calls us to think again – to re-pent. Because something is coming Someone is coming Who has not been seen before. Prophets come and go. Teachers appear and repeat the message, but this One is different. This One the greatest of divine Messengers is unworthy to serve as footman. But in order to entertain such a One – even to imagine Him, we have to repent. We have to give up our ordinary way of thinking about things, including ourselves. We have to forsake our habits of thought, our old paradigm, our distracting notions, our sins.

Human history is the story of consciousness advancing in the knowledge and love of God. But no spiritual advance ever comes without leaving something behind – forsaking something. Forsaking everything, really. Abram and Sarai have to forsake their well-to-do, comfortable life in Ur of the Chaldees in order to become Abraham and Sarah, to become the parents of Isaac and Ishmael, and of the whole human race, spiritually speaking. Moses has to forsake his princely status in Egypt and run away to Midian in order to see the great Shekinah of the Lord – the Bush that burned and was not consumed, and he had to turn aside from his chosen path in order to see it. The Children of Israel had to forsake the security to which they had become habituated in Egyptian slavery and go out into the foreboding desert in order to accept the promise of God. David had to forsake his whole way of life as a shepherd in order to follow the destiny to which God called him through the Holy Prophet Samuel. God’s Messengers are always demanding that we forsake something – something near and dear – something the Collect for today calls our sins.

Oh yes, we must be sorry for our sins. But in addition to that, we have to give up our whole limited way of thinking about ourselves and reality in general. That opening of consciousness, that vigilance, that awakening is the prerequisite for greeting our Liberator with Joy. We just love our imperfections, our little neuroses and distractions and beloved habits of slave-consciousness. We think that they are what make us who we are. We cling to them, and hold them tight. Like Esau, we settle for too little, we miss the mark, we are eager to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.

But we are NOT our imperfections, our neuroses and distractions, and habits: we are the Image of God, and we WILL be separated from our dearly beloved false identities whether we want to be or not. For He is like a refiner’s fire. And He will purify the sons of Levi. We can forsake our sins now, and then rejoice to behold His appearing, or we can continue bemused by them and then suffer a fairly shocking purgation.

Things are not as they seem. We are not who we seem. All flesh is grass, which withers and fades, but the Glory of the Lord is about to be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the Mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. We are not just flesh, born to wither and fade and die. We can forsake that illusion right now, we can repent, think again, think anew, and hasten the Day of the Lord, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved. Everything will be changed. There is no way to imagine it but in the ecstatic poetry of prophecy or the fantastic terms of apocalyptic literature and modern science fiction, pointing to the new heavens and a new earth where justice is at home, and where the Son of David will feed His flock like a shepherd…gather the lambs in His arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead them that are with young.

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.