Our December Hearts - Anne McConney

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dreams turn them into symbols of a deeper truth. And one of the most universal of these symbols is that life is a journey. We are all, somewhere deep in our psyches, poor wayfaring strangers. We are pilgrims searching for the way to God, often unaware that we have already found it.

      Jesus said, “I am the way,” and added, “No one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6)—a statement that has all too often been interpreted to mean that unless one holds the proper opinions about Jesus, one cannot get to heaven.

      We need, I think, to move beyond such concepts. Christianity is a complex religion. The “simple gospel” is not simple at all, nor was it understood so in the early church. During those first centuries, the church demanded some three years of intensive study before administering baptism. The theological thought of Paul still engrosses scholars with its intricacy and boldness. In every era across our span of two thousand years, saints, thinkers, and poets have added new insights and understandings to the once-and-forever Good News.

      When we speak of Christ, then, as “the way,” I think we need to pause and ask what we mean by that phrase. Way is, after all, one of those slippery little words with several meanings, each of them slightly different. We ask “the way” to our destination; we show a child “the way” to tie his shoes; sometimes we say with pride, “I did it my way,” or speak of “the American way.” Which of these ways do we mean when we talk of Christ?

      The answer, of course, is all of them. Christ is the path that leads into the creating mind that made the universe; he is the gateway into love and the bridge that lies across the chasm between human and divine. He is our camino real into the heart of God.

      But Christ is more than that; he is also our model and our mentor. Just as we show a child how to perform simple life skills, Christ instructs us and demonstrates for us the far more complicated skills of spiritual living. And, last of all, Christ is the sanctified life within every one of us. Somewhere in the reaches beyond this world, we have agreed to accept the inner fire kindled in us, to take on the daunting and humbling task of continuing Christ's healing and redemptive work, to say with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

      So I suggest that the Christ life is the human life and the way it represents is the human way. How could it be otherwise? It is in the human identity of Jesus that God has been revealed, the same human identity that the Athanasian Creed insists has been taken into God.

      So we poor pilgrims go on our way, robed in the ragtag glory, the tattered nobility, of our humanity, the garment we now and forever share with God. We stumble and fail and fall because that is what human beings do. We follow the vision that lies behind the sky because that is what human beings do.

      We follow the voice that speaks in the night, saying in the words of the beautiful “Jesus Hymn,” “A way am I, to thee a wayfarer.” We ask for no more than this.

      NOVEMBER 29

      THE EVE OF SAINT ANDREW

      Somewhere near the Eve of Saint Andrew I like to sit near a window and watch the day end. The winter twilight is short and comes early. The light seeps away into the west and the dark comes silently like some soft and gentle creature.

      Since I have never believed that spiritual thinking is improved by discomfort—an idea surely born in drafty northern castles and cathedrals—I sit snug and sweatered and with a warm drink at hand. As the light drains from my part of the world, I begin my entry into Advent.

      For Advent is the road into Christmas and Christmas is the great feast of Incarnation. We declare with song and ritual and pageantry the belief that the God of the cosmos, the same God who created the strange and spectacular starscapes revealed by our latest technology, also created a human family and then came as a newborn baby to join it. “It behooveth us to know our self,” writes the Blessed Julian of Norwich, “for when we know our self, we shall fully and truly know our God.” We too are incarnate—in flesh—and we must sound the depths of our own being before we can speak of how human nature can be joined to the nature of God.

      What does it mean to be human? This is the single all-engrossing subject we study all our lives, the daunting question we ask of the universe and the universe asks of us.

      There is a moment that is unlike any other in our lives, and I think it comes to most of us at a very early age: the moment we say “I” and then “why?” I remember when it came to me as a child, at a time as unlike an Andrew's Eve twilight as one could imagine.

      The day is hot and blindingly bright, high summer with the sun in power blistering the paint on the front steps, burning my feet through my sneakers. Somewhere in the picture there are crayons, broken and spilled and melting into little rainbow puddles on the front walk. I have a vague awareness that my mother will not be happy, either about the wasted crayons or the wax on the walk, but I cannot care. I do not have time for such matters; I am engaged, body, mind and soul, in a higher enterprise.

      I am looking at a tree pierced with sunlight and filled with shadowed deeps. I sit in my head like a pilot in a cockpit; I look out through my eyes as if they were windows and think I am I; I say it over and over to myself—a mantra, a mystery, finally almost a trance. I fall into the center of myself and find no way out. Why? What magic of the universe has placed me here? Why am I not sitting in some other brain and looking at some other tree? Why am I here at all? The wonder is too large to hold.

      The moment comes to us all. Somewhere, somehow, we speak the God-word, the “I am,” and the world turns around. We have moved across the divide between seeing the tree and “I am seeing the tree.” We are apprenticed to our humanity and will be for the rest of our lives.

      There is grief in this as well as wonder. We have claimed our humanity and lost the world; from this day onward we will see the tree, but only in rare and fast-fleeing moments will we be at one with the tree. No one will ever be me and I will never be anyone else. When we have recognized our own consciousness—and the consciousness of others—we have learned the basic distinction of life: the I and the not-I.

      This distinction is the key to every relationship we will ever have, with human or beast or God, and the moment it comes to us, in blazing summer or deep winter, is our Saint Andrew's Eve. It is the point-instant from which we begin our exploration of what it means to be human—to live in flesh and time and the community of our fellows—and of what it might mean to believe that God became human too.

      The day is gone now; full darkness lies across the land; the lights of the town are blinking on. Behind every yellow-bright window there is a human being, a life, a mystery.

      It is time to get up from my chair, time to turn on my own lights, time to return to the pragmatic and practical world. It is time to think about dinner.

      NOVEMBER 30

      WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL

      Sometimes I go back and read what I have written and I am appalled. Who is this person who writes for all the world as if she knew what she was talking about? This writer who speaks of cosmic mysteries with only the refractory tool of language in her hand? She is not anyone I know.

      For I know myself to be a trembler on the brink, sometimes hearing whispers from behind the sky, sometimes seeing a flash of silver like a fish disappearing into dark seas, sometimes merely confused amid messages sung in sunlight and bee-drone. News of the infinite comes through in no grammar known to us. We translate crudely and sometimes not at all.

      Yet translate we must. We human beings, it seems, have opted for meaning. We have said that to exist is not enough; we must also understand our existence. We must define this place of wonder where we have, all amazed, found ourselves, this universe where God spreads forth beauty in uncountable shapes, where the cosmic Christ touches new sunfires into being, where the Spirit flows and flames and is never still. If language is the means we must use, then we will use it, though we know it to be a harsh angel met in a lonely place. We will wrestle it through the night and leave lamed and exhausted and unsure of the blessing, but we will speak.

      We

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