Advent and Distance

 

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.