It happens every year. Thanksgiving, then the season
of Advent, then suddenly Christmas explodes upon us. Though Santa comes at the
end of the parade, he always seems to be at the beginning of something,
something trying to get itself started, something that thinks itself at the
beginning of the parade.
In the beginning was the word.
Beginnings distance themselves from us, and they
appear as if beginning all over again. Advent is like that. It is always suddenly
upon us, short-circuiting, subverting even, the distance required to make itself
appear. No one really doubts the appearance of the season, the rush to the Nativity.
We remain incredulous that the distance could contract like that.
The time it takes the light to reach us…this is the
way we talk about heavenly bodies. Astronomy, like most of us, is surprised by
the newness of the ancient, and the distance--the suddenness of the distance--that
shrinks to let something wonderful appear.
Advent is the celebration of anticipation, of the
distance that dwindles down to the appearance of the Nativity, the beginning of
the word among us. We never cease to be surprised by the word. The distance,
couched through the ages in prophetic promises, measured in promises, now
promises the promise of the promise. Anticipation and expectation could neither
anticipate nor expect such an erasure of distance that shows the word,
enfleshed and staying for a while.
Jesus stayed a while with some disciples on the road
to Emmaus. While the hearts of the disciples burned, the distance to their destination
grew shorter. While all travelers seem to arrive at the same time, the most powerful
arrivals occurs in the breaking of the bread. The disciples arrive where Jesus
finds them (and he them) in the breaking: that which calls them to the moment
and their reception of the call arrive at the same time in the appearance of
Jesus, even if that appearance is a disappearance. The distance traveled is yet
another advent. Matthew's Magi would have it no other way: the gentle shock of an
infant kicking them in the head.
All this is starting to sound a bit like
phenomenology, at least Jean-Luc Marion’s version of it. As Marion would have
it, the incoming call arrives simultaneously with its reception—the arrival of
the receiver, or the gifted--immediately, suddenly, sometimes with
bedazzlement, sometimes with a saturation that is known by an iconic disappearance.
Phenomenality, that’s another story.
Merry Christmas.