Peace, Advent and The Event

Advent reminds us of the great messianic tradition we have inherited from Judaism. The liturgical calendar embraces the kairos, the seasonality, the right-timeness of hopeful anticipation, the catching a glimpse of something approaching from the horizon. Liturgically, we come before God, love, joy and peace. Something’s coming, familiar and strange, known and as if unknown. If we let it free, it comes at us completely new. Something must be truly free so it can release itself, give itself.

The evangelist of Matthew’s gospel presents the Nativity as an event so surprising, so expectant and unexpected, that the earth alone cannot contain it, cannot bear it alone; and so he gives us its extension in the heavens, a supernova, a release of cosmic energy arriving just in time to herald an event of astronomical magnitude; yet more than just a herald, a light to the nations. 

Pax in terris. A righteous hope or a cruel joke for the holidays? Sometimes it seems the public sphere has lost its stomach for peace, hope and revelation. Here in the United States many of us prefer freedom from religion to freedom of religion, prefer to think religious things as if a 19th century child, something seldom seen and never heard. Where is the peace? Where can a sea of faith rest its head? When Motl Kamzoil asks, after hopefully suggesting that it would be a good time for the Messiah to come now, now that his community has been exiled from the shtetl, the Rabbi simply says, “we will have to wait for him someplace else.”

Where shall we wait for the Messiah? In our homes, in a closet, in a shrinking recess of our hearts? How will peace ever find its way to where it needs to be that way? Advent bears the progeny of divine love, of an irrevocable event of peace in the irrevocable event of the union of the human and the divine.

Advent speaks of and to interstellar and intrastellar happenings. Advent truly speaks to the heart, to the secret places, to the slivers of the smallest spaces. Advent also speaks in the larger spaces, in those places in desperate need of peace. It is a message of peace, and if something other than peace is heard, I suppose we’ve forgotten how to hear.