The Ever Dawning Advent
The Ever Dawning Advent
Corban McKain
I grew up in wheat fields where the highest points in the town were the steeple and the silo, relieving our home from the lidless eye of the Kansan sun. When the cold winds brushed through the crops bringing the arrival of advent each year, we devotedly lit the candles in our Swedish Lutheran parish. At confirmation we received little red work booklets; after completing them we stood in front of the church to rapturous applause.
In school, we were taught the 12 days of Christmas, and we sang this carol religiously each year until news of the holiday break rang forth from the bell of Lincoln Elementary. “On the first day of Christmas... on the second... third... fourth...” I understood this liturgical procession to Christmas morning well because it climaxed at the foot of the tree. But the hope that had come into the world? What hope was that?
Despite these rites, I confess I had no idea what it was that slowly approached on the curtails of Christmas each Sunday as we lit the wick. Was all this pomp and circumstance for old Saint Nicholas? Because I did like him and his chocolate advent calendars.
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I grew up. We moved to the Paul Bunyan State Forest. Our white minivan sagged under the weight of our luggage the whole way there. It snowed waist-deep each December now; the red carpet that annually welcomed advent to the northern hemisphere. But even as a High Schooler, it remained a mystery as to why the candles appeared and disappeared from the sanctuary. Who keeps redecorating?
I traveled to England after graduating and sat through lectures at a discipleship school. In the manor house’s leather room we all shared our spectacular stories of rescue from the world (sometimes too spectacular). The Jolly Tanner’s down the road poured us pints and we crowded in to prove our freedom from the law to one another. I still may have not known what Advent was but perhaps this was what faith was? Liberty? Antinomianism? That spring I learned that I was supposed to say, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” It was apparently more “Pauline,” since the righteousness of God had now been made known apart from the law (Rom 3:21). I still found it ironic, however, that the favorite secular band of these “Pauline” Christians was Switchfoot.
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I moved again to a village in Germany whose name I could not pronounce. Mists daily veiled the valley and brooks cascading down from the town into the pasturelands of cattle farmers. The villagers were descendants of Moravian refugees plump with stories of a world long since passed.
Despite the idyllic surroundings, I experienced a fierce, despairing doubt in the otherwise picturesque land and people. A spark had fanned to a flame and began devouring the garden in which my mustard seed of faith had been planted. The question fueling the licking blaze was short and sharp: Is Christianity true? I hadn’t the slightest inclination as to how to answer what seemed like a relatively simple inquiry. All I had known for three years was to despair from having any questions at all because it “quenched” the Spirit. But when my lymph nodes swelled into Frankenstein bolts beneath my jaw and the community’s prayer hadn’t healed me, the finger was pointed at me. I was Jonah unrepentantly retreating from Nineveh. God had given me the opportunity to throw myself overboard but I had undoubtedly been stiff-necked and God withdrew his healing touch. What was advent? Don’t ask questions.
I left disillusioned–“How original, right?” I read for a year. Graduated college. Entered seminary. I sometimes wondered what I was doing there. By then I had read enough to grasp faith propositionally–if atheism is nihilistic and nihilism is absurd, then atheist is absurd (if A equals B and B equals C, then A is equal to C). However, this Cartesian model of delineating what cannot be doubted did not breathe life into dry bones. If belief is to stretch from the wick of the spine to the soul, then like the woman at the well, I did not know this drink of living water. Walking back from our brick-laid campus one day that revelation struck me like Paul on the Damascene road. Who is Jesus if He is more than a doctrine of belief? What is living water if it is more than a metaphor? Could this have anything to do with advent?
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Years later now, I welcome this Advent season as someone looking back on disillusionment after YWAM as an almost amusing growing pain of adolescence. When one is a child, as the Apostle Paul says, they think and reason like a child (1 Cor 13:11). But when their sweet simplicity is demythologized by the spirit of the age, they are then initiated into a journey from youthful naïveté—accepting tradition and Scripture prima facie—to a second naïveté in which they put the ways of childhood behind them. For many, this desert between is a graveyard, but “beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again” as Paul Riceour describes in Symbolism of Evil.
In other words, the desert is not God-forsaken, but a refining fire. We are all cradle materialists and reductionists skeptical of any passing shadow of mystery. “Existence precedes essence.” Therefore if “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins deliberates, nothing less is required than the refinement of fire to pierce through the veil of immanence to mystery. Only then do we wish to be called again, when there is mystery.
How could Christ reveal Himself apart from my disillusionment then? Could I understand His advent aside from being disabused of metaphysical reductionism and demythologization? Would a mysterious archetype ever emerge from behind shadows apart from my being disenfranchised of childish naïveté?
For me, the advent of mystery was the advent of faith, which began through the refinement of reading fiction. “[One] cannot be too careful of his reading” as Lewis advises in Surprised by Joy. Novelists awoke me from sitting around plucking blackberries “to every common bush afire with God,” as Elizabeth Browning penned. Mystery was breathed back into the congested atmosphere of a closed universe by the Inkling’s and Macdonald’s dramatization of metaphysical realism. George Macdonald’s Phantastes first invoked the longing for a better country–a heavenly one– and I was undone (Heb 11:16). How could he know the desire that lay in exile within the recesses of my soul, unless he had known its calling too? Tolkien’s teleology drew my head under the baptismal font. Lewis forced me to face my conscience as to whether I too, like Orual, was Ungit? Williams pierced me with an indirect glimpse of the divine, the scent of God rising like incense from the forms in nature. What was happening to me? Like Isaiah, I found myself exclaiming, “but I am a man of unclean lips!” Fiction dethroned the spirit of the age and the star of Bethlehem arose in the sky as if on the wings of a cherubim to illuminate the road to Advent.
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What is Advent?
For my entire life, Advent had been a rerun episode in the life of the church: Christmas pageants, birth narratives, last year's sermon, and the traditional refrain from the pulpit—“I bring you tidings of great joy” (Lk 2:8). The Christmas season invited the competition of retailers not wonder. I didn’t believe any mysterious reality lay unpronounced behind advent. The Christ child was like the Israelite scapegoat, He disappeared with our sins into the ethereal wilderness. How could I possibly hear creation groaning, waiting for the consummation of all things then (Rom 8:22)? Groaning for the intention behind Creation, Christ’s taking on of a virgin’s flesh to consummate His cosmic purposes? Nevertheless, at Advent Christ, as human and through His passion, becomes that which, as God, He always is, to paraphrase a paraphrase of Gregory of Nyssa (Behr, Paschal Gospel, 326). Advent, in other words, inaugurates the unveiling and apocalypse of the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), the one who recapitulates all things in Himself (Eph 1:10) because He is the principle of all Creation (Jn 1:3).
We tend to think creation came at the beginning but the crucifixion is the sound of creation. In the beginning, God announced His project to make a man in His image, but it is at the cross that human beings—vivified by the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:4)—are born from His body. But instead of being placed in a garden, we will be His garden, His temple (Eph 2:21-22). This is what the unfolding story has been about, what Genesis foreshadows. Adam was only a type of the one to come (Rom 5:14). “The cross [is] impregnated in the very structure of Creation,” as John Behr says in The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death. In other words, the tree at the beginning is incorporated to complete God’s purposes in creating at the end. To make a human being in His image for eternity was always the purpose of Creation. Advent was not the celebration of a scapegoat born of a virgin, it was the mystery of His will being revealed, which He purposed in Christ (Eph 1:9).
How could I possibly have heard this without being filled with disbelief before I was disentangled from reductionism? There was no mystery that transcended nature, nor did the mystery of God’s being suffuse the created world. I had to be disillusioned so that across the desert of criticism I could be remythologized by Scripture. I was nitrogen-deficient soil to grow in.
On the other side of the desert, to borrow from Anselm, belief is faith seeking understanding. It seeks because Advent is still happening. Not only do we live between advents, but the advent of Christ’s taking on knowledgeable dimensions is God’s invitation to seek to grasp the inexhaustible mystery of the image of the invisible. We miss the point of Advent if we think we are celebrating events that once happened. We grasp, touch, speak, hear, taste, and put on Christ through searching the knowledgeable dimensions of the body of Scripture and of Creation; all declaring the mystery of Christ. Could Anselm be inciting us to see faith as a pilgrimage from these bodies to the face of God?
For me, mystery is what Advent renews each year. Reminding me that the face of each day is renewed in Christ and that is the gift of all things being made new.
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.
Corban McKain
Writer & Academic
Photography by Volkan Vardar