As I write this I am conscious that we are almost at the end of the church year, this Sunday is Advent Sunday and stands as a pointer in time to a new beginning a new possibility, and highlights a longing for God to come and for all things to be made new. Advent for me is all about longings, and I find particularly this year which has been a very painful year for me in all sorts of ways that I am entering into the groaning of all creation in a fuller way. There is something deep with in me that cries out "this is not right" and that relates to the state of my own heart and mind as much as it relates to the state of the world.
As I stand on the edge of Advent this year I sense an urgency to let go and to begin a new walk of radical faith, a faith that acknowledges that I do not grasp the vastness of God, and do not have a grip on his ways or the infinite compassion of his heart. A faith that does not rely upon its own answers or experiences, knowledge or wisdom, but rather one that dares to throw itself into the everlasting arms and to trust in a new way. I am not talking about being irresponsible and waltzing through life as if God is some sort of insurance policy but rather a simple acknowledgement that his ways are truly higher than my ways and that I am very likely to find him in surprising places.
As I reflect I on letting go I find that I am challenged by Richard Rhor's meditation from today through which he calls us to embrace a larger vision and to embrace the paradoxical nature of life and to alter our view of failure, death and pain, to see them as transformative and even creative ( or re-creative).
Neither expelling nor excluding (conservative temptation), nor perfect explaining (liberal temptation) is our task. True participation in God liberates us each from our control towers and for the compelling and overarching vision of the Reign of God—where there are no liberals or conservatives. Here, the paradoxes—life and death, success and failure, loyalty to what is and risk for what needs to be—do not fight with one another, but lie in an endless embrace. We must penetrate behind them both—into the Mystery that bears them both. This is contemplation in action.
Advent's call to look forward is a call to take the brokenness of the past and not to deny it, but rather to let it go, to allow it to fall to the ground and die in order that something new might be allowed to grow. As I ponder this I am aware that I have spent much of life defending and even hiding my vulnerabilities rather than drawing them into the light and allowing God to transform them. We don't like being vulnerable, and so much Christian teaching tells us that we must have all of our "ducks in a row" in order to be accepted, we have excluded rather than included, and I suspect we have quaked underneath our thin disguises in case somebody exposes us for the frauds that we are.
The bottom line is that in the stakes of looking good, getting it right, saying and doing and maintaining correct behaviour I am a fraud, my heart is torn and I get it wrong quite often. I can't and don't even want to be "good" in the "nice " way that churchiness expects. BUT I am God's creation and he calls me beloved, and he sees possibilities within me that far exceed any I can manufacture in myself, so on the edge of Advent I am deciding to let go, to be different by being me, flawed, vulnerable and broken but loved and embraced by the God who wants to establish his recreative work in and through me... Incarnation, death and resurrection all active and present at once in the mystery that is God...
Picture; Koder's Woman at the Well
