Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
No matter how many Advents I live through, I always expect this season to be a happy one. Somehow, from year to year, I forget that Advent is not about building a crib or painting a nursery in joyful anticipation of the coming of a sweet baby among us. Instead, Advent descends like a thief in the night, stealing us away once more to the desert, there to be tested and there to be formed or reformed once more.
It is all so disorienting. And I suppose that’s a big part of the point.
Amos reminds us that we may not know what we’re really after. “Why do you desire the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.” (Amos 5:18-19)
No, Advent is not a warm fire and a cup of coquito. It is a dry and dusty sojourn through the wilderness to the borderland of our belonging, where we can once more encounter our wild and wily God. And as much as we may think we are waiting on God, it’s really God who is waiting on us.
John’s station at the River Jordan is not accidental. The Jordan formed the border between the promised land and the desert. It is in that wilderness that the Israelites wandered after their slavery. It is there that they encountered God and that, through their trials, murmurings, and cursing God forged them into a community. It is through this wilderness that God brought her people back from the exile in Babylon. And it is into the same wilderness that the Spirit drives Jesus after his baptism, there to be tempted, but also there to be formed. For it is through his temptation that Jesus touches his deepest desire, which is for God alone.
It is in this place of wild wandering that we come to know God and, in that encounter, to be known as God’s beloved.
And so, it is to the wilderness that John calls—or we might say recalls—the people when they have strayed from God’s ways. And it is in the wilderness of this historical moment that we, too, must face down temptation and despair. It is in this wilderness of plague and political unrest and longing for communion and community that we may allow God to strip down our desire, until all we want is God. And it is from this wilderness of darkness and wandering and disorientation that our hope will emerge.
For three weeks now we have heard some of the most exquisite poetry in scripture, as Isaiah offers words of hope to those longing for their homeland. The desert in which the Israelites wandered, in which the exiles yearned for their return, and in which we, too, cry out for the bread of life, is the very place of our salvation. We might be used to thinking of the wilderness or desert as place through which we pass on our way to the homeland of God. But such a view, beautiful though it may be, shortchanges God’s promise to us.
The wilderness is not a waypoint. It is, if we have eyes to see and hands to work, the blessed theatre of our redemption. And as such, it is a paradise amidst the ruins and the dwelling place of God.
Thomas Merton, in his book on Benedictine monasticism, writes that “the monastery is a tabernacle in the desert, upon which the shekinah, the luminous cloud of the divine Presence, almost visibly descends.” He continues, “the monk is one who lives ‘in the secret of God’s face,’ immersed in the divine presence. […] The monastery is never merely a house. […] It is a Church, a sanctuary of God. It is a Tabernacle of the New Testament, where God comes to dwell with [us] not merely in a miraculous cloud but in the mystical humanity of His divine Son, Whom the cloud prefigured.”1
Our Advent prayer - Come Lord Jesus! - is not a plea to be saved from our lives. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. God is not a superhero, who swoops down to rescue us from the world we have created. No, God is a candle in the darkness, revealing the world in which we live, and illuminating the way to new and deeper life. God is the loving one who pries apart the chains that bind our hearts and frees us to offer our lives as a living sacrament. And sometimes God is a push out the door to encounter this extraordinary place we have been given to live, with all its joy and all its pain.
We Christians—and, in a peculiar way, we monks more especially so—are an in-between people. We live between the proclamation that Christ has died and Christ will come again, planting ourselves right here where Christ is risen. Just so, we make our living in the desert of this world, refraining from the easy convenience of either despair or oblivion. No, we are not the Messiah, but we, too, can be voices crying out to this world, drawing the people, and, yes, ourselves, too, back to the desert where the stars shine more brightly, pointing the way home to God.
Our longing for return is its own answer. And in our hunger for God, we are already fed. For in the ruins of our lives, God has planted us as oaks of righteousness, her full glory on display within and around us in the mystical humanity of her dear Son in the face of our brothers and sisters.
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