Malachi 3:1ff

The sermon itself carried more threat than promise, unless it be the promise of judgment. I do not mean to discount the fact of judgment, but it seems inappropriate to strike that theme as the guide to preparation for the birth of Jesus. How do we prepare ourselves for the miracle of the Incarnation? Certainly the conventions of our churches will not quite do the job, no matter how sincere the pastors and their efforts. The power of secular society so far outweighs the power of religion in our lives that we cannot count on the ambience of tradition and society to define the meaning of our existence. In this regard the passage from Malachi carries much weight.

However, lacking the support of a religious social order, the believer is forced instead to become a religious "from within". Religious life in our secular society will originate within the self, as a personal response to an inner call. But the serious attention to the inner voice as an habitual practice has been lacking in our religious tradition for a long time. Inherited habits or social pressure will not carry the day. No doubt it is for that reason that our churches have slowly but steadily been emptying over the past few decades. The American scene is several decades later than the European in this process. I have a stark memory of a great old church building near Glasgow University in Scotland on a Sunday in the year 1960. The nave would seat easily a thousand people, but the attendance on that Sunday was well under fifty. Unless there is an inner life to support one’s faith, not only will the institution be abandoned, but more critically the entire religious life and its moral structure along with it.

The theologian Karl Rahner has remarked that Christianity in the future will be mystical, or it will not be at all. Mystical experience is not merely the exceptional, some major experience of an altered state of consciousness, although it encompasses such; it is rather the spiritual experience that belongs to the essence of religious life. That we consider it radically unusual is a mark of our distance from the inner life which was typical in Christianity until the 19^th century. As one writer has observed: "The original meaning of mystical included the common Christian awareness -- at whatever degree -- of a divine presence in Scripture, religious doctrine, liturgy, and nature." It has also been noted that in our century we find more the absence of the experience of God than the experience of a Presence. What is left is a sense of a gnawing emptiness, a void within. This void is capitalized upon by the commercial interests of our society which trick us into believing that their products can fill our empty hearts. It is this void which we try to fill with the decor, the glitter, the overdecorated trees, the flashing lights and the gaily wrapped presents of Christmas. None of these wrong in themselves, but lacking the religious content, they do little to assuage our emptiness.

At the same time, there is the widespread phenomenon of the attraction to masters of the spiritual life, or to those who pose as masters. (Unfortunately, there seem to be all too many of the latter.) The source of the attraction is perhaps that in our emptiness we have no where else to turn than within as the spiritual masters have told us. But what we encounter within is first of all our experience of absence, our emptiness. But that very sense of absence, when faced and accepted, is a powerful cry for the One who is not there, as Simone Weil has said. We are reminded how often this kind of cry is heard as we read the Psalms. May not this absence, faced and accepted, be the prelude to a meeting place between the soul and the transcendence of God who has "emptied himself into the world"? This absence is for most today a place to begin the spiritual journey and to face it is to begin the process of purification and purgation.

Advent is a time of preparation for the most momentous event imaginable, God is becoming man! Of old it was remarked that God became man, that man might become God. That insight is too profound for us to imagine, much less understand. But if the Christ event is indeed a revelation then what is revealed is no less than God’s way of working with the world, a sign of what God has always already done at all times and in all places. We cannot separate the Christ event in individual lives from the Christ event in history, nor can the Christ event in history be limited to one place and one time. It is rather what God is doing all the time and has always already been doing. What happened in Bethlehem and in the years following was an historical revelation of what had already been the case. The God who visited Elijah on the side of the mountain in a still small voice, quite contrary to what the prophet wanted, now takes the form of "a little babe who made a woman cry". Our preparation must involve the three aspects of the spiritual path: purgation, illumination and union.

Our first clue in preparation for the Christ event, for Christmas, is perhaps to be found with Mary at the annunciation. A brief excursus into Biblical scholarship is useful in preparing us to appreciate the Annunciation and Magnificat. Mary’s story, as we read it in St. Luke, was no doubt modeled on the O.T. parallel of Abraham and Sarah with whom the history of Israel began. Since Luke is writing of a new Israel, a new genesis, he begins with a new Abraham and a new Sarah. It as such that Jesus’ father and mother are presented. "Elizabeth is barren as Sarah was (Lk. 1:7; Gen. 11:30), and she and her husband are both ‘advanced in days’ (Lk. 1:7; Gen. 18:11). Zacharias is, like Abraham, divinely warned of the coming birth of a son (Lk. 1:13; Gen. 17:16), and like him is told: ‘Thy wife shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name. . .’(Lk. 1:13; Gen. 17:19),. . . and so on." Skipping ahead to the annunciation to Mary we find Luke inspired by the prophet par excellence, of the incarnation, Isaiah, and to the earlier Anointed One whose son the Christ is to be, i.e., David. And as Isaiah had written "Behold a virgin shall conceive in her womb, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Emanuel" (Isa. 7:14), so Gabriel says to the virgin Mary: "Fear not. Mary. . .thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bear a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus. Thus Jesus is to be the fulfillment of the promise of god to David of the eternity of his kingdom as in Isa. 9:6-7, and II Sam. 2. For Mary’s response, St. Luke was Inspired by the parallel of Hannah and her son Samuel. Just as Hannah described herself as the handmaid to the Lord (I Sam. 1:11 ) so is Mary’s "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" (LK. 1:38) And the words of Hannah are in sentiment and language very much akin to Mary’s as she responds to Gabriel: "Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord ; let it be to me according to your word." To get the full measure of Mary’s response, it is best to read the whole passage, but I want to focus on Mary’s humility and meekness.

First, meekness is widely understood to mean weak, or flaccid. That such is not the case is clear from the fact that Moses was considered meek in Biblical description. The word meek here means rather tractable, responsive, teachable. Mary doubted not the presence and message of Gabriel and however impossible and ridiculous it might seem, accepted as her calling, her vocation, to be a mother to a child who would be called "Holy and the Son of God". Some verses from her Magnificat (Lk. 1:46ff) are important to recall here:

More important than meekness was her humility, captured in her estimate of herself as of "low estate" and her willingness to accept as a blessing of God the fact of becoming pregnant without benefit of having a husband. It is fitting to meditate on the meaning of humility as a major virtue of spirituality. Fitting in a double sense, because this paper is written for a retreat held at a Benedictine monastery and St. Benedict held humility to be of the first order for a monastic, or indeed for any person serious about spirituality. In a commentary on Chapter Seven of Benedict’s Rule the author said: "This chapter on humility is a strangely wonderful and intriguingly distressing treatise on the process of spiritual life. It does not say ‘Be perfect.’ It says, ‘Be honest about what you are and you will come to know God.’ It does not say ‘Be flawless and you will earn God.’ It says ‘If you recognize the presence of God in life, you will soon become more and more perfect.’ But this perfection is not in the 20th century sense of impeccability. This perfection is in the biblical sense of having become matured, ripened, whole." A Benedictine nun has written "Humility, the lost virtue of the twentieth century, is crying to heaven for rediscovery. The development of nations, the preservation of the globe, the achievement of human community may well depend on it."

[Much of the following treatment on the virtues comes from the work of Frithjof Schuon, perhaps the world’s leading metaphysician and scholar of world religion. I have used his work as presented by James Cutsinger, (a prominent scholar of the esoteric, contemplative, understanding of Christianity) from his work Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon.]

Humility, as a means of purgation, then will be for us an important element of our preparation for the coming of Christ which we celebrate at Christmas. True humility means taking stock of your own worth, objectively and impartially. It means, indeed it requires, serious honesty about yourself; giving credit for the good and accepting the negative as also being part of yourself. This is akin to the "self-examen" of Ignatius. This kind of analysis must be carried on continually, with ruthless honesty administered in love. Do not be overly kind to yourself, or overly hard on yourself. Most importantly, do not give yourself credit for having created the good that you find honestly belongs to you; it was and is a gift, a grace. "It is illogical to believe oneself to be ‘the worst of men,’" and "this is not only because the worst of men would not take himself to be such, for if he did he would not be the worst, but because such a unique individual as this does not exist, . . ." Claiming to be the worst of sinners is a clever and camouflaged way of being prideful; it is a false humility, a form of hypocrisy.

Humility is the first of the fundamental virtues and in the spiritual tradition is part of the process of purgation. Purgation means getting detached from that which holds us back from the goal of union with god. "The soul must be detached from the world, and this means not only giving up certain things, but being stripped , or cleansed of all the desires and images that keep us bound to those things even in their absence." Thus humility does not mean putting yourself down, but looking at yourself with the same degree of detachment you would wish to use with a total stranger. "It means considering both my good points and bad and treating myself as severely as the Truth allows, but not more." In fact, especially at the outset of the spiritual journey, humility is not merely difficult, but dangerous because one is tempted either to be proud of one’s humility, thus giving ego credit for having attained the virtue, or to engage in overly severe disciplines to burn up the desire. The old practice of self-flagellation is an example of the latter, punishing the ego by making it miserable. What the spiritual way reminds us is rather that manifestation, existence, is by definition imperfect and imperfection means evil and hence suffering. We do not need to provide artificial suffering. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof". If we face it honestly, and openly, the life process itself contains trials and suffering aplenty. Need it be said that one has every right to avoid whatever trial and suffering is avoidable. As in the Lord’s prayer: "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil".

A second lesson to be learned from Mary concerns and illuminates charity, a companion virtue to humility. Charity corresponds in the spiritual journey to illumination and expansion. Very simply charity is spiritual love; it is love without strings, without ego entanglement, without expectation. Spiritual love must thus be distinguished from romantic love, friendship, and love of family. That is how Jesus can tell us to love our enemy; it means to love God in even the enemy. Mary had no way of knowing what to expect from her unexpected pregnancy, but out of her love for God she accepted it, "let it be to me according to your word". Her love is directed to the unexpected, and likely unwanted, child that is conceived within her. What unmarried woman, especially in that day, would welcome pregnancy and love the fetus growing within? But virtue pertains to the soul, not the body or even the rational mind; thus spiritual love comes from the soul. Soul, under the conditions of time and space, the conditions of worldly existence, expresses itself in mind, imagination, feelings and will; all those things which can and do bring us into contact with God. In his discussion of faith, Paul Tillich has pointed out that faith means one’s ultimate concern. In this regard faith is matter of soul; it is the soul which "faiths"; Mary’s soul cleaves to God and God alone; thus she loves her prospective baby in God and for God’s sake.

Out of spiritual love one can make a commitment to God and to action, but then a lot of work must ensue to keep the promise, to keep one’s faith alive, intact, functional. At our baptism we make, or have made for us, certain commitments. Those commitments are repeated when we come to first communion and should be at each communion thereafter, in fact repeated each day on arising, thereby dedicating the day to God. Such commitments involve feelings, sentiments, for these too belong to the soul. "In the human microcosm, the feeling soul is joined to the discerning Intellect, as in the Divine Order, Mercy is joined to Omniscience; and as, in the final analysis Infinitude is consubstantial with the Absolute." Emotion, feeling, is not equivalent to emotionalism which is a subjective distortion of the soul’s true relation to the world and hence to be avoided. But the practice of true charity avoids these pitfalls. Schuon defines true charity as "in essence to love God more than ourselves, to love our neighbor as ourselves, thus to love ourselves, but less than God; not to love our neighbor more than ourselves, and not to feel ourselves obliged to give him what, in our opinion, we would not deserve if we were in his place." It is easily seen from this definition that following the spiritual path cannot be a selfish thing as some seem to believe. Nor does following this path mean any neglect of social responsibility, although it does put social needs in the proper perspective. Much, if not all social action "does no more than switch bad things and good" because it lacks a Godly focus, instead focusing on material definitions of well being. Charity has little to do with the redistribution of ephemeral goods and power, but we must never lose sight of the fact that, however small the act, and however seemingly insignificant the recipient, "as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me" (Matt. 25:40). But the reward here is not the gift to the recipient, rather it is to the giver. What interests God is the eternal life of the one who gives and of the one who receives so that the real benefit to the recipient is not the gift, but the contact with the giver through whom one experiences Divine Charity and hence experiences God.

A final virtue that needs to be properly understood and practiced is Veracity which corresponds to the third and highest level of the spiritual path called union or perfection. It must be noted here that for the majority of us, the full attainment of this last state is a far off goal and few there are who experience it, especially as a steady state of being. First, let us understand clearly what is meant by veracity, another term for which is objectivity. This is not objectivity as defined by the sciences, although the scientific usage may well reflect understandings developed within spiritual practice in the middle ages. But it is not truth or objectivity about the material world, or with quantitative measures that is involved here. We have already seen how veracity, objectivity, is involved in both humility and in love; thus it is not something that waits till the other virtues are somehow perfected. All three virtues hang together, but this third is the epitome, the root of all. Another way to say this is to observe that truth must be the foundation of everything else in the spiritual life. Truth involves discernment, carefully distinguishing between business and busyness, between what is useful and necessary and what is trivial, time-occupying, diversionary from spirituality. Such discernment requires self-mastery.

Self-mastery involves mastering, indeed conquering our passions so that they do not rule our lives. How many there are who wreck their lives by succumbing to one passion or another. As the retired president of my seminary used to say in his charge to the graduating class, (all men in that time), "watch out young men, if money doesn’t get you, women will". Equally dangerous passions are ambition, lust for power and glory. One would do well in practicing discipline to continually examine oneself for evidence of any of the seven deadly sins, any of which are fatal flaws in the spiritual path. It is not that we should, or even can, destroy the natural impulses of the soul, but that they must be harnessed and that energy turned to spiritual account. Anger, for example, is a powerful emotion, but its energy need not be allowed to be destructive; in fact, understood and harnessed, it is a source of power that can be directed to good.

Discipline is to be directed both to the inner life and in the external world. The old axiom "whatever is worth doing is worth doing well" is applied here. Schuon has captured it well: "be neither negligent nor disordered, nor . . . extravagant. In nature, each thing is entirely what it must be and each thing is in its rightful place according to the laws of hierarchy, equilibrium, proportions, rhythms; freedom of form and movement is combined with an underlying coordination; so it is that perfection of soul requires that the outward be in conformity with the inward." * So the spiritual path means to discern what is the more important because closer to the Divine and what is of lesser importance because farther from the Divine in terms of its reality. Everything is included within this hierarchy, dreams, notions, propensities, atoms, worlds, stars and nebulae. Thus, says Schuon, "Each man bears in himself the double obligation of duty in relation to the inferior and or piety in relation to the superior, and this double principle is capable of incalculable applications; it includes even inanimate nature, in the sense that everything can serve us, according to circumstances either as a celestial principle or as a terrestrial substance." But make no mistake, none of the above is to exclude what is usually termed fun, joy, laughter, play. All of these are also well devoted to the spiritual life. The famous painting "American Gothic" is not an example of useful, positive spirituality.

It is further the case, that Veracity has the characteristic of practicality. Adherence to Truth enables us to discern between what is important and what is unimportant. Truth means knowing in some profound way the nature of Ultimate Reality and that all ordinary reality is not only subordinate to Ultimate Reality, but finds its meanng by its relationship thereunto. The purpose of life is solely the journey to God. Once this fact is grasped everything can be measured by its perspective. An ethical question for example needs to be framed by asking what will serve the ultimate spiritual welfare of the person or persons involved, including myself. This same fact can resolve most of our difficulties in managing the time of our lives and sorting out our various responsibilities. Since my primary responsibility before God is as Schuon says to save my soul, other things take their place in respect to that. One can see firstly "I am not responsible for what others do; and secondly, I cannot change the world, or do away with every wrong, and I need not fret over this. I am responsible before God for my soul, hence for my spiritual and social duties. I discriminate between what is essential and what is not, or between the Real and the unreal. All else I leave in God’s hands." The very words "saving my own soul" sends a shock wave through those of us who have been well exposed to the social action themes which have gripped and ripped the churches over the past forty years or so. If we are to understand Schuon’s position, it must first be grasped that, as noted above, the purpose and thus the quality of life cannot at all be measured in terms of material welfare. Ultimate welfare has to do with the spiritual path and its goal, union with God. Since I have little command over any soul, but my own, it is there that I must begin. Further, if I am not following the spiritual path with a considerable degree of faithfulness, my good deeds will be permeated by misjudgments and ego gratifications which all too often will be fatal flaws. Doubtless no good work is perfect, but work done from an improperly guided soul wrecks more mischief than good. The history of Christian mission, while providing much good, has provided an equal measure or greater measure of ill both for the givers and the receivers. How much destruction we have wrought by lack of humility in our conviction that God is on our side and that we are doing God’s will. At the same time we must be realists and aware that perhaps nothing we shall ever do will be truly perfect, thus we must not be tempted by a perfectionism which can only create strain, stress, tension and bitterness. "In the final analysis, veracity has to do with striking a balance between dignity and formailty, on the one hand, and a childlike spontaneity, on the other."

Now, it must be asked, does the practice of these virtues in the spirit of prayer prepare us for the Christ event? What is the, or a Christ event? First, realize that the Jesus Christ event, the particular and historical event is like a window, or more accurately, a symbol. A symbol makes present the reality which it represents. Thus Jesus Christ is and was God with us. That Presence, whether in Jesus, or in a contemporary Christ event, is marked by at least three particular characteristics. The first to be noted here is judgment. Having noted at the outset the passage from Malachi that the appearance of the Christ is like the refiners’ fire, that quote can now be explained. Because a Christ event is the presence of God, it is Truth. It is truth as revelation and what is revealed is the truth, first off, about oneself. Not in the manner of a judge who is ready to pronounce sentence, but in the manner in which, when placed alongside perfection, imperfection is revealed. A Christ event is a flawless mirror which reflects back to us the truth of ourselves with all our warts and blemishes. But at the same time this event is a Loving Presence. When this factor of Love is missing, we have the perfectionist error, Hell and damnation overshadowing the acceptance and caring. So the truth revealed is not only about us and our imperfection, but that God loves and accepts us. Without this latter element, Truth would be unbearable, but with it Truth appears a grace.

So the second characteristic of a Christ event is grace. It is gracious in presenting present truth and is revealing the love of God and in pointing the way forward and enabling one to go that way. This grace-enabling comes with no compulsion, no arm-twisting demand. It is offered freely as the best possibility for this particular life at this particular moment. The possibility offered may be a very simple one, or it may be in the direction of life transforming process. The latter event is repeatedly replayed in human experience; who has not had those events after which nothing was ever the same. Sometimes it is a near-death experience, sometimes the death of a loved one, sometimes a miraculous gift out of the blue. There are endless variations on the fundamental theme of the transformation event. But invariably such an event includes revelation-judgment-in-love and the grace-filled opening or showing of another way forward. So that what is being offered is new understanding of our very own life and one’s actual relation to God, the Ground of Being. It is clear at this point that what has been called life was death, and that what one has considered death is really life. Jesus’ statement that you must lose your life to save it can now make sense. Because the ego is not a true center; it is only an accumulation, a conglomerate of memories mistaken for the true Self, then that misconception which is our very identity must die. It is to be replaced by the Eternal Center, the Divine Center, the true Self. One’s identity is always God-identity, but in the ego state is not realized. Through a transformation experience one’s true identity can be realized and claimed. Hence the experience of unity with God--at this point one becomes what one has always already been, the image of God.

The third of the characteristics is redemption. Judgment, enlightenment, redemption are the invariable motifs of the Christ event. Contact with the God who is truly God means always at least these elements. "The new life of which the New Testament so confidently speaks comes only out of death, not death in the usual sense, but the death of human self-striving and eternal hopes in human remedies, the death of man’s struggle for self-justification and visible salvation. . . Now the only possibility is shown to be dying to the world that one may live to God." If this be what the Christmas event means, the revelation of how God has always already been working with the human, "God becoming man in order that man might become God", then our practice of humility, charity and veracity makes perfect sense. Only when we recognize our incarnated form and consequently our imperfection, begin to accept God’s love for us uniquely and eternally, and see the Truth about ourselves and our world, only then can we receive the Christ event with joy and gratitude. For then we shall be realizing our oneship, our unity with God; when we shall be what we are, the imago Dei.