Advent | Come Down!

All around us at this time of year, hundreds of millions of people are aware that this is the season of Advent: a time of waiting, a time for being awake and alert. That chimes well with our practice, and so I thought I might look at it in that light and from that angle.

The Advent liturgy is seen by many as the most beautiful of the whole year and it is choreographed very expertly. The first figure we meet is Isaiah pointing to the birth, but it is a birth in a distant future. Though he is pointing from a distance of 800 years, his speech is impassioned: “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down.”¹ He wants the ultimate to be realized here and now.

Tear open the heavens and come down. Down from where? Down, I suppose, from abstraction and theory and endless explanation. Some abstraction is unavoidable, and it has its uses, but much of it is like a balloon with no content but hot air. Hot air rises, and so abstraction seems superior and elevated. It’s amazing how much abstraction there is in ordinary discourse. We used to divide nouns into abstract and concrete: abstract nouns such as truth, virtue, beauty, and concrete nouns such as chair, tree, stone…. But in fact the so-called concrete nouns are just as abstract as the abstract ones! The word tree, for example, is made to stand for all the trees that ever existed on this planet, though no two are exactly alike in every detail. The word tree is not experience; you couldn’t sit under it, it is only a word.

Oh that he would tear open the heavens and come down—down out of language, out of abstraction, out of hot air.

But Isaiah also said very practical things like: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!”² That meant repair the roads! Jerusalem is surrounded by desert, desert roads get covered in sand. If some great personage was expected, the first thing to do was to clear the sand off the roads. What is sand? It’s the trillion little things, the stuff that fills and clogs our life.

Never before has there been an age when human beings were so clogged with information or so assaulted by language on every side—morning, noon, and night. Today we have wonderful roads for driving on, but the roads that are clogged are the spiritual ones. Isaiah couldn’t have imagined it, but his words nevertheless can direct our attention to it.

The second great figure who appears in the Advent liturgy is John the Baptist. He was only six months older than Jesus, and was even a cousin. He has powerful things to say, and a very abrasive way of saying them. He is rough, he is the original Iron John. Though he is very near in time to Jesus, in other ways he is still somewhat distant.

At the end of Advent appears the third great figure pointing to the birth of Christ. It is Mary his mother. The waiting is at last focused precisely. It could not be more precisely located than this. God’s new deed, the Child, is to be born in her.

Years ago I lived in Cork, and I remember waiting once for a long-delayed bus. The queue got longer as we waited, and all the different kinds of waiting were exhibited there. Several people waited in a fidgety, restless manner, repeatedly looking up the road for the invisible bus, looking at their watches and rolling their eyes. When was it going to come? Then there were others whose waiting was quite different. These had gone into themselves and closed the door. I particularly remember one man who had became totally stoical and was just leaning against the lamp post in what looked like despair. That too is a manner of waiting.

But there, among them, was a young woman who was heavily pregnant. There was a deeper kind of waiting in her, she had an extraordinary calm, she was glowing. She was waiting for the bus, yes, but her deeper waiting was paradoxical, and this was probably the key to her remarkable calmness: she was waiting for something that was there already. It struck me that this is exactly what meditation is: waiting for something that is already here, but needing to become visible. We are not waiting impatiently, nor stoically; we are waiting for something that is closer to us than we are to ourselves. That kind of waiting puts us in the right place for that remarkable calm and the glowing sense of presence that that young woman had. Over the years I have returned to the memory of her, especially when I find myself waiting in wrong ways. She doesn’t know that she has been my teacher for many years. There’s no telling how far the influence of our meditation may reach.

In Christ, God has torn open the heavens and come down. “God is born in us,”³ said Meister Eckhart. It is hard to resist the upward pull of abstraction. Meditation is a downward pull: it is incarnation. The Word became flesh in order to live among us; what if we are not here when he comes, but in the clouds! In kinhin,⁴ every step is a grounding, down to the roots, a kind of earthing of all the static in the mind.

1 Isaiah 64, 1

2 Isaiah 40, 3

3 The actual quote is “The son is born in us.” Meister Eckhart, M.O.C. Walshe (trans.) (1981). Sermons and Treatises. London: Watkins Publishing, vol. 2, 4

4 Kinhin is walking meditation.

Donagh O’Shea was born in Cork, Ireland, and joined the Dominican Order in 1961. He studied in Switzerland and taught philosophy in England and Ireland. He is the author of several books including, A Hundred Roads to Here: Introductions to Meditation and Take Nothing for the Journey (Dominican Publications, Dublin, 2023 and 2013). He studied Zen with Daido Loori and Willigis Jaeger. He is director of the Dominican Retreat Centre, Tallaght, Dublin, home to Grey Heron Zendo.