I suggested that the first theme
of Advent is Waiting. The second theme might
be Watching. Advent can be tricky these
days because it’s far too hard to hold Christmas at bay… children arrive singing
carols… In the process we can miss a lot, unless we take notice of some of the
great Advent hymns… There’s a light upon the mountains… or, Awake,
awake! for night is flying… that one pictures the watchmen on the city
ramparts, bound to stay awake; they are peering, watching for the first dawn
light from the east… Zion hears the watchmen singing, and all her heart with
joy is springing; she wakes, she rises from her gloom… Advent, said Rowan
Williams, is when we all become Jews again, needing to be spoken to in our
confusions, needing a word from God. It
is the time of watching and hope.
Waiting and watching… a basic
rhythm of our lives. We have done it
often – with a sick child, awaiting the birth of a child, awaiting exam results,
awaiting whatever has to happen before we can get married, waiting at the
airport when perhaps all is not well, watching a business decline with pandemic
restrictions, watching happen what you hoped wouldn’t happen.
While waiting has to do with time going by, however, watching is about paying attention, while time goes by.[1] In the gentle disciplines of contemplative life and prayer we may find ourselves more and more distancing, gratefully it may be, from the chatter that constitutes so much of what we call communication these days… responses ranging from reflex to witty… reacting off the top of our heads, mainly, to what someone just said… with whatever it was that happened to me… swapping stories, swapping opinions, “you’ll never guess what she told me”… one way or another therefore, bringing me in, my ego. This is not attention. Fr Richard Rohr comes at it in this rather startling way: The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. (Any) change is always on our side (ego, you see, intrudes) -- God is present, but we’re not present to Presence… We’re almost always somewhere else. We are reprocessing the past or worrying about the future… We just keep thinking in the same problematic ways that our minds love to operate. But we can say that all spiritual teaching… is teaching us how to be present to the moment… present to the Presence.[2]
That is the essence of it, and that is the difference between the
minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passage of time, which is chronos[3]
…busy involved people are always acutely aware of chronos, life by
timetable… and kairos[4],
which is God’s time, the moment that arrests our attention, our presence, the
moment in which we know ourselves seen and addressed… or even dimly suspect
that we were. Jesus sometimes calls it
being awake. We can call it
contemplative life. Advent then is attending
to God, cultivating the gifts of being able to attend simply to God, and
especially at this time being acutely aware of all we will otherwise miss in
our busyness.
[1] There
may be exceptions… in the waiting room of North Shore Hospital emergency
medicine I recommend going into a gentle stupor.
[2] From
Richard Rohr, First Sunday
of Advent: To Be Awake Is to Be Now– Here, November 30,
2014.
[3] Greek
χρόνος, as in Matthew 2:7, etc.
[4]
Greek καιρός, as in Matthew 8:29, etc.
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