week one Setting Out
Day One: Adoration of the Children
Gerrit van Honthorst
Chiaroscuro is an artistic technique that uses strong contrasts between light and dark to give a sense of depth and realism to figures and things. Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Caravaggio were three of the most prominent masters of the technique. In its most dramatic form, it was also known as tenebrism – when intense, dramatic lighting was used to separate figures and amplify relationship and raw emotion. The nocturnal scene with figures, illumined by candlelight, became a distinct genre and was exploited in many religious paintings of the Renaissance. Chiaroscuro particularly lends itself to scenes of mystery, where artists can make their viewers wonder what might emerge from the apparent emptiness of the dark. Such mastery of light and dark, how they interplay in the human condition, and in our world – the search for what is emerging within God’s mysterious plan – is the stuff of Advent.
Among the most beautiful Nativities in the history of art is the Adoration of the Child by Gerrit van Honthorst, also known in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti (Gerard of the Night), for his penchant for painting touching and evocative nocturnal scenes. A wonderful calmness: a feeling of divine peace seems to overflow from the entire painting, entering
our hearts and minds. There is a muffled mysterious atmosphere, as only Christmas night can convey – a moment in which the light of the Child overflows onto the faces of those who enter into relationship with him. And the flesh is the medium of encounter. The Church Father Tertullian coined the theological phrase, caro cardo salutis – the flesh is the hinge of salvation, convinced that the body that we share with Christ, that is enlightened by him, is the locus of salvation. I suppose, the interplay of light in the relationship between the child and those who gather around him to adore is the visible expression of this. The divine light spreads from the newborn’s body and softens every feature of those who look upon him. On the right of the canvas, Joseph emerges from a dark background. He is leaning on a cane, his shadowed face wrapped in wonder, love and joy. His face is marked by wrinkles that indicate his age and a heavy life of work. Yet, the light dances over these realities and gives them warmth and depth. The enchanted faces of the two children are wrapped in amazement and caught in natural smiles. Their blushed cheeks and curls give a real naturalness to the scene. It’s as if each one were called out of darkness into being – like everything made by God in the beginning. Mary unveils the naked body of the Son of God and his revealing manifests the truth of everyone else: their roughness is softened, and they glow in Christ’s light. This is the Advent journey – the path into being, into light.
Day Two: Chiaroscuro
St Lucy and St John of the Cross
On 21 December, the shortest day of the year and therefore the longest night, the whole Church yearns for light – on that day, in the darkness, the cry goes up “O Oriens” – O Rising Sun come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. This is a constant theme of our Advent, isn’t it?
Before the Julian calendar was reformed under Pope Gregory XIII, 13 December was thought to be the shortest and darkest day and its night the longest – not surprising, then, that the Church chose to celebrate St Lucy, whose name means light, on that very day. The manipulation of things is theological rather than cynical: it tells the hardcore truth of Christianity – no matter what the date or how deep the night, new Nazareths happen every day.
Just as sure as the fact that the presence of our Saviour will come, and did come, is the fact that he comes again and again in the lives of his faithful, by the fire of his Spirit and the power of his Word. Whether it be in the body of the Virgin, in a young girl who remained steadfast under the persecutions of Diocletian, even while her body was doused with oil and resin to make a human torch, or whether it is in our own bodies or the bodies of our brothers and sisters still suffering throughout the world.
Now, in us all, the words of the Gospel ring true: “Since John the Baptist came, up to this present time, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence and the violent are taking it by storm.” The interplay of dark and light still manifests a scene of beauty to our world.
Despite darkness, despite violence, or paradoxically even because of it, heaven is being taken by storm. So, on these first dark days of Advent, when we’re a bit dateless and can sometimes feel near to death ourselves, St Lucy is a light of faith by which we can see more clearly the presence of Christ in our world. A light who invites us to a place in that great company who storm heaven still. In his great poem The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe, Gerard Manley Hopkins gives us a powerful prayer to help us imagine that great light St Lucy reflects and dwells in:
Be Christ our Saviour still. Of her flesh he took flesh: He does take fresh and fresh, Though much the mystery how, Not flesh but spirit now And makes, O marvellous! New Nazareths in us, Where she shall yet conceive Him, morning, noon, and evening.
On 13 December we celebrate a saint renowned for light and the following day one famed for night, for darkness.
They say that often, as a child, John stared into the night. Laid flat on his back, his body in the shape of a cross, he would look up into the black Castilian sky. And later we know that other friars would regularly find him outside at night, praying by some trees in the dark. But, of course, he’s most famous for the darkness of his prison cell – a night from which the sun, through a small chink, would only rescue him for about an hour a day.
It wasn’t that John of the Cross didn’t fear the terrors of the night – obviously he did; but he was even more captivated by its mystery, its beauty and the possibility it held. Night terrifies us because it is unavoidable, destabilising, beyond our control – like the terrifying night Jesus spent in Gethsemane – it smothers everything and makes us fit for nothing. But there and only there, in that nothing which is best called night, do we begin to get a real sense of being – of the awesome presence of God and of the insignificance of ourselves. Then and there, in the night, a mysterious quest for the One who is Other begins – and suddenly the night is filled with all possibility:
So dark the night!
At rest and hushed my house, I went out with no one knowing Upon a lover’s quest Ah the sheer grace! – so blest, My eager heart with love aflame and glowing.1
God has brought the night of Advent down upon us –yes, in part to terrify us with the unavoidable fact of his glorious return – yes, to make us aware of his sovereignty and our insignificance – but most of all to draw our soul from its hushed house on a lover’s quest. The essential meaning of Advent – parousia – is the beginning of a sense of being – the awakening to a presence which brings us out of ourselves and into a delightful and mysterious search for God.
The wisdom of St John of the Cross urges us to welcome the night of Advent – a night that reduces our many and complex desires to one – that purifies us of our natural waywardness so that we can be singular in our hope. As John teaches:
To bring peace to passion and lay it to rest
Be inclined
Not to what is easier but to what is harder
Not to what is more but to what is less
Not to wanting something but to wanting nothing
Longing to enter, in utter nakedness, and emptiness, and poverty for Christ.
(St John of the Cross, “Ascent of Mount Carmel”, 1, 13:5-6)
May what John said of his night be true of our Advent.
Day Three: Waiting in Expectation
Alfred Delp SJ
I read this funny, little, short story once. It was by Flannery O’Connor, and I liked it very much. The story was called A Good Man is Hard to Find. I remember one of the characters says something like: “We’d all be good Christians, all the time, if there was somebody there to hold a gun to our heads every minute of the day.”
If we’re not careful, we can get that idea from the Gospels in this first couple of weeks of Advent, can’t we? That we had better be good because God is coming on a day we do not know and at an hour we do not expect. We must repent, change, and lead good lives because the Kingdom of God, the Judgement, is close at hand.
But God isn’t like that, is He? Though some of the Advent images suggest it, God would never threaten or coerce us into being good – he’d never hold a gun to our head: worry us with our end or the end of the world. So how can we explain the immediate ‘threat’ of the Lord’s coming – winnowing fork in his hand? We’re told he will come to seek us like a thief in the night and that his arrival will be sprung on us like a trap.
Alfred Delp was a young, German Jesuit captured by the Nazis at the end of World War II; imprisoned on jumpedup charges of plotting the assassination of Hitler. From his
cell, the priest wrote to his parishioners – telling them how he had made a wreath inside there for Advent. He said this:
Despite this gloomy time, with a certitude about life and faith, we have set up the Advent wreath, even though no one knows here how long it will stand and whether we will get to light all five candles...What we do comes from a sense of certitude about things, humanity and God – things that are fixed and valid in themselves. These things give us the right to light candles and to believe in the light.2
There is no threat in the immediacy of Christ’s coming – it isn’t bullying or coercive but when considered calmly, it’s an invitation to focus on what is essential and true. That’s what Alfred Delp did. By the light of his prison wreath, he came to know what mattered – what is fixed and unchangeable – the humanity we share with Jesus Christ, God, and our eternal destiny. The threat of the Lord’s coming is no threat at all but a beautiful invitation to fix our eyes and concentrate on all that God wants to do in us through Christ.
Day Four: A Space and a Time for Waiting
Cardinal Francis-Xavier Văn Thuận
Do you remember the ticker-tape timer from school?
Simple, little machines used in physics lessons to calculate speed. Physics was very difficult for me but even I remember and understand the ticker-tape experiment. A long thin strip of paper was attached to a toy car. The car was set rolling down a ramp. As the tape passed through the timer, a bar would hammer down dots on to it and mark it. The bar came down so many times a second – so the fewer the dots and the bigger the spaces between the dots on the tape, the faster the car was moving.
The prophets knew all about this principle too – that the impression of God on his people exposed the spaces in the heart of humanity. The spaces revealed to them the speed of God’s coming: time was ticking by, getting short. The day of the Lord was getting closer.
There are spaces in each of us aren’t there? And mysteriously, the size and frequency of these spaces show us the closeness of the Lord – the more conscious we are of the space, the nearer God seems. For the ancients, the sun and moon and stars marked out the day and allowed them to measure time. Jesus warns that the regular pattern of things is changing: events of history are intensifying time: they’re bringing to a crescendo this sense of space –
of what’s missing at the heart of humanity: then they will see the Son of Man he says. We will see what is at the heart of each one of us and how much we long for God.
It makes sense, then, doesn’t it? – not to fill our hearts with other things but to open up a space: not to let them be coarsened – to blunt our attentiveness with all that doesn’t matter but to open up a space in our heart for the one thing that does: God. And the more intense our sense of emptiness the more quickly God will come!
Fr Vanstone, an Anglican priest who once ministered in the north of England, wrote a lovely book called The Stature of Waiting. He believed that we see the full stature of Christ – His true glory – not in His wonderful words or His marvellous miracles but in His waiting: His humble patience before Pilate, His hidden waiting at Bethlehem and Nazareth, His silent waiting on the Cross and in the tomb. That, says Vanstone, is when we see the true dignity and power of our Saviour – when He waits on God’s work.
We don’t like waiting, do we? It seems like a useless waste of time. John the Baptist couldn’t wait – even in the womb he leapt for joy. But he learnt later – when he was waiting in prison. It’s then we start to see the full stature of his faith. Then he waits and wonders: “Are you the one who is to come – or must we expect another?” He waits, Mary waits, and we all have to learn to wait if ever we are to come to full stature in Christ. We must wait for God to act in the space we’ve made for him in our hearts.
When Cardinal Francis-Xavier Văn Thuận was arrested by the Communists on 15 August 1975, he remembered the words of a friend of his who had been imprisoned for twelve years: “I have spent half my life waiting, it is true. All prisoners, myself included, constantly wait to be let go.” Văn Thuận decided that he would not wait in this way –simply resigned – but that while waiting, he would live the present moment to the full and fill it with love. His would be an active waiting – “A straight line,” he said “consists of millions of little points. The road to Hope is paved with small acts of hope along the way.”3 Văn Thuận gives a deep insight into the Baptist’s retelling of the words of the prophets: make his paths straight. The valleys must be filled up to make level ground so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.
Day Five: Taking the Straight Path
St Philip Neri
“What, then, do we need?” Philip Neri would repeatedly ask this question. “Fuoco, fede, ferro! Fire, faith, iron,” was the answer he gave. We can find great inspiration in these three elements of the Christian life: fire, faith, iron but also in paying attention to the order in which St Philip puts them.
I’m sure you know the story of Philip’s encounter with God in the catacombs. In 1544, when the young Florentine
had arrived in Rome and long before becoming a priest, he made it his practice to pray secretly, each night, in the catacombs of St Sebastian on the Appian Way. In a dissolute city and at a time when the curia was weighed down by many scandals, Philip wanted to be close to the primitive Church and the inspiration of her saints. According to the testimony of Pietro Consolini – a close friend and confidant – while praying one night, Philip saw a ball of fire come toward him, enter his mouth and fill his breast, expanding over his heart. This experience of fire was such that he fell to the ground and cried out: “Enough Lord! Enough, I cannot take more.” God’s presence in Philip’s soul overflowed into his body – eyes, cheeks, face – we are told “beamed with a gladness, a joy all of divine love”.
During his life, Philip hardly spoke of this most personal consolation – mentioning it only in old age and before he died. Yet often he had hinted as to what he called secretum meum mihi – my secret to myself. Is there any of us without such a secret? Without memory of those moments when the fire of God’s love touched us, stirred us, called us?
When did the fire expand your heart?
It is important to go back to this Principle and Foundation, as St Ignatius will later call it – and it must come first – because from it comes our faith: our sure and certain conviction that God has communicated Himself to us in the comfort of His Spirit. The ball of fire that we each experienced one day probably took a long time to
unravel. Often it isn’t a simple joy but a touch of God’s love that makes us aware of the one thing that matters. The fire naturally leads to reflection – and this alone gives us the certainty to which we cling: faith.
And then comes the time for iron – for the straight path of discipleship. “What then do we need?” asked St Philip.
Fire, faith and iron: fire to inflame the heart of the Apostle, faith to convince us that He who gave the fire of the Spirit in those days, will give it still today, iron to shape our wills and to establish us in obedience to Him who for years and years has guided us.4
How often on our own journey – and in the history of the Church have we sadly got the order wrong: so often we’ve first demanded iron of ourselves and others – believing the fundamental lie that if we’re disciplined, if we work very, very hard, say our prayers and do good – faith will come and God will reward us with the fire of his love. No!
Fire – faith – iron: this is the order and can only be the order for our life and discipleship. God loved us first and secretly implanted in us a fire that gave birth to faith – the sure conviction that God is with us – and the disciplined practice of our life will follow.
