Sixteen.
To be.
Rose Marie Berger writes of Advent as an adult in these difficult times:
And tonight a friend told me that she doesn't watch the growing light on the Advent wreath with hopeful anticipation anymore, but with dreadful trepidation. "Why was God born to us if he was only going to abandon us in the end? If he was only going to leave us to fend for ourselves?" O magnificent desolation; such agonizing love. It burns in the bones. At Christmas it is unwrapped, laid bare, unswaddled.
We live in an excruciating world. Are Advent and Christmas only annual psychological pilgrimages to childhood memories? Are they merely rites that we hope will create the world anew, as social anthropologists might describe it, if we properly re-enact a sacred story? I need an incarnation more powerful than the hell of the daily headlines.
A FEW YEARS AGO, hiking in the Peruvian Andes, I got stuck in a cave. My friends were ahead of me and turned a corner. Suddenly, I was alone. There was no flashlight. I am very claustrophobic.
For a moment I felt sheer terror—that physically urgent need to be anywhere else. Then I had a brief vision from above my body. I was looking down on the curve of the Earth, the high field in the mountains, the pile of rocks with the cave's mouth, and my body trapped in a granite crevice below the surface. Next, I just stopped breathing—like someone pulled the plug on my being. The darkness, to say it simply, unmade me.
Now, swaddled in this cathedral of Indiana limestone, I remember that experience. "I am such a long way in," said the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. "I see no way through and no space: everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone." Is this some bit of the terror of Advent? That we must become lost, then unmade? The minutes alone in the cave seemed to last a lifetime.
Suddenly, I smelled the phosphorous odor of a match. A flame illuminated the face of an elderly Incan man who reached for my hand. The warmth of his coarsened palm restored me to myself. I breathed.
And is this Christmas? That we are grasped by the hand of another and given back to our self? When the desert father Abba Hilarion went to visit Abba Anthony in his mountain cave, Anthony greeted him, saying, "You are welcome, torch which awakens the day." Abba Hilarion replied, "Peace to you, pillar of light, giving light to the world." Is this what God is trying to say? Be flame.
Found here: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0401&article=040165
To be.
Rose Marie Berger writes of Advent as an adult in these difficult times:
And tonight a friend told me that she doesn't watch the growing light on the Advent wreath with hopeful anticipation anymore, but with dreadful trepidation. "Why was God born to us if he was only going to abandon us in the end? If he was only going to leave us to fend for ourselves?" O magnificent desolation; such agonizing love. It burns in the bones. At Christmas it is unwrapped, laid bare, unswaddled.
We live in an excruciating world. Are Advent and Christmas only annual psychological pilgrimages to childhood memories? Are they merely rites that we hope will create the world anew, as social anthropologists might describe it, if we properly re-enact a sacred story? I need an incarnation more powerful than the hell of the daily headlines.
A FEW YEARS AGO, hiking in the Peruvian Andes, I got stuck in a cave. My friends were ahead of me and turned a corner. Suddenly, I was alone. There was no flashlight. I am very claustrophobic.
For a moment I felt sheer terror—that physically urgent need to be anywhere else. Then I had a brief vision from above my body. I was looking down on the curve of the Earth, the high field in the mountains, the pile of rocks with the cave's mouth, and my body trapped in a granite crevice below the surface. Next, I just stopped breathing—like someone pulled the plug on my being. The darkness, to say it simply, unmade me.
Now, swaddled in this cathedral of Indiana limestone, I remember that experience. "I am such a long way in," said the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. "I see no way through and no space: everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone." Is this some bit of the terror of Advent? That we must become lost, then unmade? The minutes alone in the cave seemed to last a lifetime.
Suddenly, I smelled the phosphorous odor of a match. A flame illuminated the face of an elderly Incan man who reached for my hand. The warmth of his coarsened palm restored me to myself. I breathed.
And is this Christmas? That we are grasped by the hand of another and given back to our self? When the desert father Abba Hilarion went to visit Abba Anthony in his mountain cave, Anthony greeted him, saying, "You are welcome, torch which awakens the day." Abba Hilarion replied, "Peace to you, pillar of light, giving light to the world." Is this what God is trying to say? Be flame.
Found here: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0401&article=040165
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