Advent: Remembering. Anticipating. Increasing Appreciation for What God Chose to Call “Home”
Advent expresses in symbol and ritual 3 stages of the Christian journey. Christ has come. Christ will come again. And Christ is here now. We remember the first (Christ has come). We look to the second (Christ will come again). And we live the third (Christ is here now). All three are part and parcel of our lives. Let’s reflect briefly on each of these stages.
“Christ has come. Christ will come again. And Christ is here now. ”
First, Advent is a remembering. We recapture what a whole people, a special people, a loved people lived for centuries—a deep longing for God.
This first level of Advent’s meaning is reflected in the growing darkness of our shortened days as we move towards the winter solstice. We remember the human family groping in the gloom of ignorance and sin, yearning for “the day of the Lord” but unable to make it dawn. In Isaiah’s words:
You were angry, and we sinned. You hid yourself and we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean and you have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
But this first layer of Advent meaning is not just darkness and longing; it is also light. We recall how the darkness was dissipated when the Light of the World shone in the world he had shaped. True, Jesus is no longer an infant, but he was; he no longer lies in the manger, but he did—and literally, it made all the difference in the world! And so we remember it – He did come!
Secondly, Advent not only looks back, it looks ahead. We not only recall Christ’s first coming, we anticipate his finalcoming. The trouble is, that end-time is also wrapped in darkness. To begin with, we do not know when he will come.
In the year past—beginning with the coronavirus pandemic and continuing through winter tornadoes, spring floods, summer hurricanes, and fall wildfires—we have seen the kinds of signs that might suggest that the end of the world is coming soon.
And that brings us to the third level of Advent meaning. We not only look back on a first coming, and forward to a final coming. We are not caught between a past that is gone and a future not yet here. What links yesterday and tomorrow is today. We are to live now a life that Christ’s first coming made possible; and by living that life now, we prepare for his final coming. He is no longer in a crib of straw, not yet on clouds of glory. But he is here. The light shines in the darkness . . . now!
In the light of Jesus’ first coming, his incarnation, we have no grounds on which to dismiss this world as some second-rate practice field for the real life in heaven. The eternal God become flesh at Bethlehem declares that there is no practice and nothing is second rate. Life in this world is already life with God.
The Enfleshment of God
The event we are preparing to celebrate in the feast of Christmas is mind-boggling: the incarnation—the enfleshment of God in a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. From here on out, God is identified with and discovered within this bodiliness, this fleshiness, this materiality, this sensuality. God literally “took on” this world as part of God’s self! Henceforth, everything we do in our embodied being has spiritual implications.
That said, while on the one hand Christianity has the highest theological evaluation of the body amongst all the religions of the world, on the other hand, it has given little attention to the body’s role in the spiritual life in positive terms. High theology, low practice. This is where the embodied practice of yoga is a real gift to Christians.
We are blessed to see in our time a movement toward a more genuinely holistic spirituality, one that recognizes if it’s good for my body, it’s good for my soul; and if it’s good for my soul, it’s good for my body. And the postural practice of hatha yoga, developed to help people sit more grounded and centered in meditation (raja yoga), is a shining example of a holistic spiritual practice engaging my body, my mind, and my spirit.
There are now numerous examples of how Christians are engaging with yoga posture flows not just as a preparation for sitting in raja yoga (meditation), but as embodied prayers in and of themselves, e.g. Cindy Senarighi in her Yoga Devotion program; Dayna Gelinas in New Day Yoga: Yoga from a Christian Perspective; Sally Grillo in Prayerful Yoga; and my DVD Yoga Prayer and book Prayer of Heart and Body: Meditation and Yoga as Christian Spiritual Practice.
The feast of Christmas we are preparing to celebrate invites us to an ever-deepening recognition that we have been gifted with these bodies because this is where God dwells. All flesh is holy, and it is in these bodies that we will work out our salvation. Yoga provides us with methods and means to become more at home in our embodied-being, and to consciously and appreciatively go to God the way God came to us: in and through a body.
Since the only life we know is earthly and sensual, it follows that this is the stuff of our spirituality as well. As you kneel before the image of a child in a crib this Christmas, contemplate the amazing truth proclaimed: our embodied nature is the place that God, for love of us, chose to call “home”.
