What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. Hans Urs von Balthasar
Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. Toni Morrison
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. Sydney J. Harris
Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which is never shown to anybody. Mark Twain
The more involved you are, the more significant your learning will be. Stephen Covey
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise. Ingmar Bergman
Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. Rumi
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. Walt Whitman
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. Rebecca Solnit
Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. Meister Eckhart
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. John Dewey
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Eric Hoffer
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. Louisa May Alcott
The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms. Thomas Merton
As some of you recognize, Advent is a special season for me, a time of preparation for what remains as one of the great mysteries, even ironies, of my faith tradition – the baby in a manger representing an incarnate hope for the world that has, needless to say, yet to be fully realized.
To put so much stock in such a vulnerable setting has always seemed a marvelous leap of faith to me. In our own time, some factions of Christianity seem to prefer the God of wrath and vengeance to the figure who left the cold manger to forgive – and transform — the coldness of our hearts, calling us to feed multitudes, put away swords, cease petty competitions, give cloaks to the poor, and help others to feel the grace that had long been denied.
For some self-proclaimed Christians, apparently, this post-manger Jesus is simply too naïve, too divorced from the dog-eat-dog societies which we have crafted for ourselves, too willing to extend an invitation to soften hearts and minds that we have willingly cased in metaphorical cement. Jesus may “get us” as the US television commercial proclaims, but for some in our Christian orbit, he apparently doesn’t “get” our times, doesn’t “get” the rampant “evil” knocking at our doors which apparently obscures” the “evil” for which we are also responsible while giving us license to hate and purge the “evil” which some of us are quite convinced lies wholly beyond our remit.
This time of what I at least would consider a form of pseudo faith would not seem to easily accommodate the self-preparation and commitment to growth and learning to which the season of Advent invites us all.
Perhaps it is because I am now too old to embrace so much of our modern mind-set, but I remain almost serially disinterested in the incessant branding and self-promotion which characterizes the current moment. I am less interested in hearing what people “know” than what they have learned about their craft, about themselves and the “dark sides” of their metaphorical moons, about their responsibility to others close and far, about the world and its multiple challenges and blessings. I am less interested in where people think they “are” and more interested in where they’ve been and where they’re heading. It is the path that appeals to me, especially the path that beckons our better selves and which provides a context for the forgiveness of our less-better ones.
After all, if Advent is to mean anything beyond consulting our budgets and making sure our cars are sufficiently gassed to endure the malls, it means preparation of a special sort, a preparation that is one part attention and two parts assessment, one part seeking comfort in tradition and two parts allowing tradition to breath and grow, to stare down the inherited recipes for life and refuse to follow them entirely straight, to keep the windows of learning, growth and change open even as we stare into a mirror reflecting all we have been and failed to be, all we have neglected and all we have cherished.
And so as this new Advent adventure unfolds, I know that I too have learned, albeit often too late, often too casually, often with transaction in mind rather than grace. What I have learned, especially during Advent season, is reflected in some of the quotations above. Those same quotations no doubt also mark the limits of my current learning, mark the way still to sojourn on a long and wonder-filled path towards a life that is finally and ultimately in sync with itself, becoming more of a “gift to God” that might actually be in sync with God.
And what are some of those Advent learnings you might ask? Well as with my other posts, it might be more fruitful to visit the introductory quotations rather than dwell on my own reflection. But a few things come to the fore. For starters, I’ve often felt that many of us need a crash course in wonder, leaving those windows open for the unknown which is not entirely unknowable, making space for the new ingredients which could spice up a recipe, or even energize a life. So many of us struggle with letting God be God, giving ample credence to the belief that God honors our path, honors our growth, even when we backslide, even when we misrepresent grace in all its forms, even when we fail to acknowledge that our failures are not God’s failure, our spiritual ignorance is not God’s ignorance, our enemies are not God’s enemies.
There is something seriously wrong at this time given those within my own faith tradition who proclaim to know precisely what God wants from us, what God has in mind for us, but who are so often steeped in grievance, preferring to vanquish rather than to forgive, proclaiming enemies as though such was a badge of divine favor rather than a symbol of divine distance. I’m not sure I always know what Advent requires of me, but I’m pretty sure that making and destroying enemies is not it.
And this leads me to the next point, perhaps the final one lest I test your patience further. For faith to be real, and for the quality of learning which faith in Advent seems to require, it must be fully and practically engaged. I know that there have been times – too many in number – when I have talked a better game than I have played, when I have doubled down on the learning I’ve acquired and shut the windows on the wonderous revelations which continue to flood our world, albeit those which we largely ignore. I don’t always recall that we have actually been given metaphorical guidance for this revelation in the form of parents and guardians who routinely, at times even seemlessly, adjust their caregiving to the stages of the children under their charge. We know that children are continually evolving, and we know that our own adjustments to their growth are the healthy and loving responses. Truly, the life of Advent is also about change and the God who honors it, who adjusts the forms and contours of divine love as we struggle to move in directions which allow us to celebrate a created order which needs more care from us and about which we still have so much to learn.
This learning may have something to do with classrooms but has more to do with life itself. We point here to an immersion experience, immersing in the not-yet-known to both confirm and revise what it is that we thought we knew about faith, about the world, or about ourselves. It is learning as a preparation of sorts, but a preparation which is more layered and nuanced than merely breaking out last year’s metaphorical tree ornaments, social schedules and cookie recipes. It is about preparing ourselves to be those “spiritual beings having human experiences,” to learn how best to both be active and to sit still, to be both curious and grateful, to be both attentive and reflective, to sail our own ship and help others sail as well by risking a more robust and dynamic worldly presence, by learning all that we can in those places where learning is best served, the world which we believe has experienced the gift of divine presence and which calls us to share in that presence yet again.
Of all the quotations at the front of this post, the one from Toni Morrison probably expresses best my understanding of the Advent Season. For love, indeed, is a diploma, an elusive achievement that is greater perhaps than all other achievements to be had in this world, one which tests us, humbles us, confounds us, sometimes bringing us to our knees, sometimes bringing us to our senses. Love is a hard practice. Faith is a hard practice as well. During this season, in a time of armed violence, acrimony and division, a time when trust is scarce and forgiveness scarcer still, it seems as though Morisson’s “diploma” is further from reach than ever. But there is a path of learning and preparation for us to follow. There is a way forward to graduation for us.
So far as I can tell, the Advent path to this graduation is to recommit to turning at least some of our mirrors into windows, to learn and prepare as though the full flowering of our spiritual and physical lives depended on it. Advent represents our annual calling to do precisely that.
gapwblog 
Leave a comment