A Pilgrimage Through Advent

God is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overthrows, 
but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.
Martin Buber

The light pouring in draws me to the window. There’s something about its quality that is irresistible. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, it is low and brilliant in the Western sky, and I feel its pull to grab coffee and head outside for a star bath, even in the brisk winter air.

Under the stars, I muse at the interesting combinations of energies at work right now in my life. On one hand there’s a call to pilgrimage out into far corners of the world via the miracle of the internet while at the same time, the energy of Advent is upon me—of patient waiting and making ready for something that approaches—just as a pregnant woman “nests” as a birthing draws closer. The star seems to beam a call to an intentional “Pilgrimage through Advent” this year but I can’t help but give a sigh as I turn and go back inside this morning. I wonder to myself how much of a “real” Christmas we can create sequestered at home in the daily hohum-dom of routines, how much holiday cheer can another zoom gathering really generate, how much potential birth can occur with all the weightiness of so much very real death around us.  Yet, in the early morning darkness, I feel the pull of a star. 

It is foundational to the Way of Christuman that it is our striving with polarity, with paradox, with the mysterium tremendum of the Holy that generates newness of life—the potentia of the birth that approaches. This season seems filled with a plethora of paradoxical images: of the birth of a King in a manger, of gifts at birth that prepare for death, of candles that burn seemingly without oil, of candles lit to remind us that it is more blessed to give than receive, to serve than be served.  There is the tension of opposite energies in noisy reveling in praise of silence, in the busyness in preparation for stillness, in hope that grows proportionally to the ever-lengthening darkness of the days. There is the paradox of a season when making time for the timeless takes on the urgency of a deadline. This whole year has been one filled with such polar tensions: in some cases, we’ve grown more cosmopolitan even as we have become homebound; and in many cases our imaginations have been set free, even as we have had choices and freedom of movement restricted. 

In the 15th c. Nicholas of Cusa coined the term coincidentia oppositorum or coincidence of opposites—to describe reality as he saw it: that all beings, all creation is constantly enfolded in the oneness of the Divine Source while at the same time, there is a constant unfolding of this Source, God, into creation, into time and space. God is“the coincidence of opposites,” says Cusa, and “God’s reality lies beyond any familiar domain in which the principle of contradiction holds sway.” 

In The Secret Life of the Seine, Mort Rosenblum writes: “When the imagination is fired, the soul follows.” It would seem that a pilgrimage through Advent, one that still lands us in our own bed each night, calls us to behold with wonder the timeless coincidentia oppositorum of this moment in time.  A Pilgrimage through Advent is akin to Proust’s “voyage of discovery”: it consists “not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes….” In looking beyond the mysterium hohum-dum of our days, to behold the wonder of the infolding and unfolding of the mysterium tremendum in this moment of time, we may only find the new birth we seek as we…

…look in places 
where one would not expect 
as in a manger for a King 
or in a stable for a God 
or in the day-to-day for a Birth. 

Renew my hope, 
guide my search, 
teach me to trust the star’s pull. 

—From the Prayer to the Mystery of Birth and Rebirth