ADVENTUAL

…and the light shines in the darkness

and the darkness did not overcome it

—John  1:5

The piece below was written for a Christian community. I regret that I did not add that the principal idea presented here was quickly lost and has largely been overlooked, except for the small contingent of mystic Christians down the ages. Because of my referenced “practical“ navigation aide that sets things apart, hardly a generation had passed before Jesus’s and, especially, Paul’s reconciling vision became just one more tribal, exclusionary, even oppressive, cultural movement. 

Hence, around the world, and highlighted in American Christian culture today, the exact opposite of reconciliation predominates. 

But if we take the underpinning message in my piece  as descriptive of the actual nature of things—“ things as they is,” as grammatically insisted upon by Soto Zen Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki— this current and long abiding darkness will, in the fullness of time, show its never absent bright face.

This moment is seamless. What we think of as time is itself an aspect of eternity. We use the idea of time to focus our attention—to notice, to point. Sometimes, as in this moment, our pointing is also a remembering.

When we mark something on the Christian calendar, as we do with Advent, we are highlighting something already present. We draw it forth from the seamless ground of being and render it remarkable. It is fitting that Advent is a season of darkness. This small message highlights not darkness versus light, but their interpenetration: the light present in darkness before we see it clearly—before we recognize it as Light.

To navigate what we call life, we have developed a language that divides the world into pairs of opposites. This serves us well in some practical matters, less well in others. One such division is us and others. Often, without noticing, we set people apart from ourselves—othering them—forgetting who we actually are.

From its beginning, the Christian faith saw that this kind of division does not serve what is most true. In Christ there is no male or female, no Greek or Jew, no slave or free. The faith bears witness to its own reconciling heart: that Christ might be all in all.

When we put on the mind of Christ, divisions fall away. All is reconciled—with each and all—and we come to know ourselves in God as God knows Godself in us, without distinction. This is truly good news: we know our neighbors as ourselves. Literally.

When everything is reconciled, we see anew. And when we see anew—when we are born of the Spirit—we no longer take darkness and its companions (despair, emptiness, discouragement, blindness) as the whole story. Instead, darkness itself is revealed as luminous—no longer opposed to light, but reconciled with it, participating in it.

Seen this way, Advent darkness is light-filled. Nothing is excluded. All is being reconciled into God, in whom we live and move and have our being. What once seemed absent is discovered to be present. The light shines in the darkness because light and darkness are not two.

The darkness may be the cloud of unknowing, or the cloud of witnesses—knowing and witnessing to the ever-reconciled nature of God, neighbor, and self.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.

So it is.
So it is.

A blessed and joyful Advent
to one and all—
one in All, All in one.

From your neighbor,
your very own self,

Michael