What Are We Waiting For?
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been the part-time priest-in-charge of a parish that is waiting for the appointment of a new incumbent. As a result, I’m doing much more pastoral work than usual. The limitations of the COVID pandemic mean that it’s not possible to meet many members of the parish in person. Instead, I use the telephone to reach out to people who have to remain homebound. Recently I was talking to a widow well into her nineties who told me she hadn’t been more than about a block from home since the beginning of the pandemic. While she might take a walk around the block, or step out into her back yard, she has her groceries and other necessities delivered. Her adult children and grandchildren, who live on the other side of the country, check in regularly with her by phone. She said, “I can’t complain really. I’m still in good health and have a roof over my head but, you know, no one has touched me since March.” I was struck dumb for a few moments; the wistfulness and longing in her voice were so palpable.
Next to coughing and sneezing in public, touch has become the great social prohibition of the pandemic. Even though physical distancing is crucial in reducing the spread of the disease, this woman’s experience reminds us how much we need touch. All of us rely on touch to provide comfort and offer support. Touch soothes and calms. The sick need the touch that bathes and dresses, lifts and assists. Touch can be misused as we’re increasingly aware. The #MeToo movement and abuse scandals remind us that people, especially men, can turn touch into a way of imposing power over others. Touch is our first sense to develop and appears to be the last to shut down as we approach death’s door.
Other senses are organized around a key centre. By contrast, skin is the organ for touch and it stretches over the entire body. Our skin stands between us and the outside world. It heats us and cools us, metabolizes vitamin D, keeps our innards in and pathogens out. This very barrier between us and the rest of the world is the means whereby we first learn there can be someone outside ourselves. Mothers and infants do an enormous amount of touching, the memory of which remains with us as the ultimate experience of selfless love. Research has shown that children in orphanages who received little touch in the first years of life often have cognitive and behavioural deficits later in life.
Our language is full of touch metaphors: we keep in touch; we’re touched by a kind gesture; touchy people are annoying. We look for touchstones and describe risky situations as “touch and go”.
I think about that elderly woman and her longing to touch and be touched again as we move into the season of Advent. Advent is commonly described as a season of preparation, a season marked by an eager waiting for Christmas. As I felt the longing in her voice, I sensed a resonance with the yearning expressed in so many of the elegiac hymns and prayers of the Advent season. Surely all of us will bring to the season a longing for an end to the pandemic and a return to what we conspire to call “normal life.”
We might go further and live the season in anticipation of the birth of God in the flesh – the Incarnation. Yoga practitioners relate warmly to this theme inasmuch as we seek God by means of our bodies, bodies that God honoured by himself taking on a body. But we may misread the sense of this stupendous mystery if we think that we are reborn simply through a participation in Christ’s birth. It is on the Cross, in the blood and water flowing from Christ’s pierced side, that the Church is born of Christ. That is, God’s condescension in taking on our humanity does not save us apart from the redemption that is won on the Cross. It is not the nativity of Christ, as such, which saves us, but rather the Cross and resurrection to which the Nativity was the necessary prerequisite. This is beautifully expressed in the collect for Christmas Day which comes from Leo the Great in the fifth century:
O God you wonderfully created and yet more wonderfully restored our human nature [i.e., in the death and resurrection of Christ]. May we share the divine life of your Son Jesus Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity, [cf. Philippians 2:6-10], and now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.” We may think that reasonably good health and a steady income are all we need for happiness. My elderly parishioner discovered she needs more. She needs connection and communion. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection gift us with more than we could have asked or imagined: a new humanity.
If we look closer at the classical prayers and hymns of Advent, we find that in their most obvious sense they are not waiting for the Nativity, an event that has already taken place, but for the Second Coming of Christ which is yet to come. We are not waiting and hoping for something that has already happened. Who does that? Instead, the hopes and longings of the prophets are put on our lips not because the birth of Christ was in and of itself the object of their hope. What were they hoping for? They hoped for the coming of the Kingdom of God, for the establishment of a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, the establishment of God’s rule in justice, love, and peace. The first coming of Christ in his Nativity has only sharpened our longing for the coming of that day. We may have started to practice yoga in order to deal with stress or to deal with a sore back, but after a time, perhaps to our surprise, we begin to discover that as our bodies open, so our hearts are opening to spirit. We delight in the sense of unity and peace we experience in yoga practice, but Advent declares that this is just the foretaste of a fullness to come.
This longing and anticipation continue right through the Christmas season and into Epiphany. We celebrate Christ’s appearance to the Magi, his baptism by John in the Jordan, and his first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first “sign of his glory.” These all fix our gaze upon the heavenly birth through which we are to find him again, not in some illusion of a past come back, but in the very presence of the one “who was and is and is to come.”
The bodiliness that we experience and celebrate in yoga practice is a bodiliness that is also charged with deep melancholy. We age, we ail, we lose touch. The psalmist says to God, “You turn us back to the dust and say, ‘Go back, O child of earth.’” This is the fate God has decreed for us, that dust must return to dust. There is nothing about the pandemic that has changed this permanent human situation. It has simply made it harder to ignore.
“Our capacity to touch and to be touched, as well as all the other senses, give us now partial, broken, and fleeting perfections. ”
They wither in the grasp and are snatched away even while they wither. Advent hope declares that they will be found again, perfect, complete, and lasting in the absolute beauty of God, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Life is not a bad joke with human beings as helpless victims, but is even now the pale and splintered reflection of a divine splendour and beauty in which alone we can find lasting peace and joy.
“All our activity will be Amen and Alleluia....There we shall rest, and we shall see; we shall see, and we shall love; we shall love, and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end, and shall not end” (St. Augustine, Confessions, X, xxvii).
