Conversations » Advent 09
The season comes around again for simple, quiet beginnings. For Christians this is the start of a new year, at least in the soul realm – a time of doing the deep heart’s work of recovering our “original face” before we were born. If one finds their way to what my sister Ann calls “the mythos gate” * and learns how to pass through, there opens a subtle world of being, more interior, more silent and still than the one we daily inhabit. Advent beckons us there…
All the themes and readings of the liturgy compose us in a world of waiting, of serene expectation and hope for the dawning of a new time, a time of renewal and rebirth played out in a poetics of anticipation – anticipation for a child, a wonder-child, fresh from the womb of divinity: the Christ Child.
Lately I have been in a steady conversation with that mysterious Child ever gestating in the great round womb of the universe as its deepest subjectivity and newness, as its eternal beginning. And since we are creatures in whom divinity is being born again and again in countless ways, I wonder about that Child gestating in us.
The other day, to begin the Advent practice of getting little and uncluttered and quiet, I made my way into The Oratory where there is only a prayer chair and huge image of The Little Flower, Therese of the Child Jesus. What better spiritual guide through this season than the one who experimented her whole brief life with a way of spiritual childhood? But knowing Therese, I understood that this kind of childhood was the realization of an old soul, a wise and seasoned being who had discovered some soul-truth by way of growing younger and younger day by day till she had found her way back to the womb of God.
Is it possible to live in the womb of God as divinity’s own pure potential – to come to sense and feel oneself as kin to that Christ Child originally revealed in Jesus, “the first-born of a New Creation?” And what would it mean to live as one perpetually being born in the “renewal of one’s mind,” one’s heart and habits – without memory or forethought to obscure the graceful possibility of the present moment? What would it be like to just be there with beginners mind each instant, letting dissolve by inattention the old-self-ways that distract us from the annunciations and immaculate conceptions that mean to bring The Christ Child to birth. Again. Here and now. In us…?
This is what I am wondering this Advent – such a great time for wondering. What are you wondering?
* Mythos Gate by Ann Deignan: further information on the Books Page