Advent Homily

Advent Homily

Waiting for the light

29 November 2008

James Hanvey

The Archbishop of Canterbury launched a campaign this week urging people to reclaim Advent as a time of preparation and reflection. It is also, a theologian argues, a time that allows us to define what is human in a new way - in sharp contrast to the secularist vision of society

A reflective stillness lies at the centre of Advent. Placed between Christ's first and second coming, the rhythms of the liturgy measure our time. Quietly, but insistently, it awakens our hope and invites us to wait upon the Lord who will fulfil his promise. It assures us that we will not wait in vain. Advent calls us to renew and deepen our trust, while the world finds trust difficult, and "hope" is dismissed as naive. Now, in this season of Advent we come to know that this time, the time in which we live, whatever the time, is the time of our redemption.

The liturgy of Advent is not like the seasonal background music in the shops, designed to put us in the right mood for spending. It is the song of faith, which expresses the reality from which we live our lives, and that faith gives us a particular way of seeing the world, of living in it and for it. Without pretension, we might describe it as a prophetic perspective. The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel calls it the "exegesis of existence from a divine perspective". I think this is a good description of what we mean by discerning the "signs of the times". Christ is the centre of our existence; he is the one who establishes our perspective. For this reason, the Christian way of seeing things is necessarily distinctive. To those who do not share this perspective, it will appear strange. Hence the problem and the puzzle that Christianity poses for a secular culture. The puzzle is not caused by a Christ-centred perspective alone, however. Where a post-Christian society has forgotten how to read the substance of Christian faith, there can be a genuine ignorance but also a cultivated misunderstanding among those who presume to know Christianity already. The old cliché about familiarity breeding contempt can be disconcertingly true. We live at a moment when our society is marked by deep struggles about its identity, values and purpose. The Church wants humanity to succeed, not fail. That is why it is passionately engaged in this struggle. It does not have any ambition to take away the legitimate independence of the secular but it does have a vision of what that might be.

There are other voices, of course, sometimes representing an aggressive secularism or an anti-theism, a vision of a secular society completely free of religion and its influence. Part of this approach is to construct a version of religion, especially Catholicism, that not only makes it strange to the secular mind but presents it as a threat. Antitheism represents religion as the enemy of the good that a secular society aspires to. Religion in general, but the Church in particular, comes to stand for all the deepest fears and demons of a liberal secularism: it is prejudiced, oppressive, irrational, authoritarian, capable of inspiring fanatical violence and abusing power. How often is the "religious" position characterised in this way? If religion is exorcised then somehow society is restored to health. Liberated from the myths that hold us back we can now make progress towards the secular light. If successful, this strategy of atheistic secularism not only gains a narrative dominance in defining society, it can feel its own vision legitimated and cleansed.

It would be foolish to deny that religion has its exotic, bizarre, grotesque and corrupt elements. But even a superficial glance at the state of our world or society gives enough evidence that these traits are not the monopoly of religion. A liberal, democratic or totalitarian secular world is just as dark and broken as any other. The high priests of secular modernity can only look upon the reality of such a world with fear and horror. They know that ultimately their own doctrine of justification by faith alone in science, rationality, autonomy and limitless progress cannot produce salvation. Indeed, the evidence of the last century in particular is proof enough that science, technology and secular reason contain their own demons. What the doctrine can do, however, is to perform discursive as well as social and political rites of deliverance of which the marginalisation or destruction of religion is one. However, such acts only serve to disguise the crisis of late modernity, of which postmodernity is a symptom.

Advent calls us to consider not only that God is, but who God is. It does not present a puzzle but a mystery: God has finally disclosed his name, "Emanuel" - God with us. We expect a great theophany but all we have is an obscure stable. Even more radically, God chooses to be a man, a person, a human being. Humanity and God are now inseparable and cannot be thought apart. We can no longer deny God without in some way denying ourselves. To exile him from the world is to alienate ourselves from our own truth. This is the Christian truth and it must inevitably challenge the secular dream of the sovereign self and its domination of creation. This is why it remains subversive of all our claims of omnipotence. All the arguments advanced by contemporary anti-theists in the secularist cause about the damage that religion can do to your mind or the impossibility of God's existence are dull and tired. That they are not new is not the point. If there is a battle to define a secular society, it hinges on the deeper battle to define what is human. This is the real issue.

When secularists declare that "God is dead" or try to banish religion from the public space, they appear to offer us a liberation but they are also re-defining who we are. Liberation comes at a price. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls it exclusive humanism: "there are no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true."

If there is nothing else beyond ourselves, we have, at last, become masters of our own destiny. Not only are we the principal character in our own story, we are the writer and the reader as well. Even a person who had no religious faith would be entitled to ask, "What's the catch?" If we are truly the architects of our own humanity, if there is no ultimate accountability for who we are or what we can become, are we not subject to every philosophical, political, scientific or eugenic fantasy of what constitutes the perfect human being and the perfect human society? If it is true that we are self-made, then in whose image are we coined? We need only look to history, especially our recent history, to find eloquent witness to the impoverishment and waste resulting from such madness.

In contrast, the Advent liturgy offers no false dreams. With a steady, clear-eyed realism it asks us to look at the world in which we live; the world in which Word has chosen to become flesh. This is not a look that retreats into sentimental optimism or drags us into a weary fatalism. Advent reminds us that God has made the human condition his own condition. It takes us beyond the facile hopes of a somewhere, sometime better place or the gestures of stoic despair.

Left to ourselves, we remain only an endless enigma but in Christ we see ourselves again. He, the image of the unseen God, also reveals our image, the truth of who we are and what we are to become. In him, we see what it means to be fully human, fully alive. This is why Christianity can never be in any doubt about the intrinsic value and dignity that belongs to every person. The transformative social, economic, and political significance of this truth are immediately clear. Human value and dignity is not dependent upon economic wealth, social status, intellectual ability or social utility. Laws and constitutions may enshrine rights, but the value and dignity of the human person cannot ultimately depend upon them. We know from experience that legal constructions and social conventions can be ignored, withdrawn or changed as powers and circumstances dictate.

A Christian faith that understands the meaning of Jesus Christ knows that the intrinsic dignity and value of the human person, from the beginning of life to its end, is secured within God's own Triune life. The Church's absolute opposition to any form of instrumentalisation of the human person is not only an ethical principle but a theological truth.

Grounded in the reality of Christ, Christianity offers a vision of an "integral humanism". It seeks to understand both the uniqueness and relational totality of every person. If we are serious about genuine human flourishing, the building of a real culture of life, then persons cannot be reduced to the material even when this is understood in the most complex way. We are spiritual beings who live in transcendence which is expressed in every aspect of our lives and relationships. Each one of us has a purpose, a reason for being; each of us is a unique and irreplaceable gift to the whole of humanity. If we are seduced into the impoverished vision of an "exclusive humanism", how can we create a culture that is genuinely life-giving? If we accept false images of our diminished selves and deny our unique vocation as human beings, then whose servant do we become?

A liberal secular society places great emphasis on personal autonomy. The potential increase or loss of autonomy is often the persuasive argument for or against a particular policy or position. In the birth, death and Resurrection of his Son, God not only presents us with the true image of what it is to be human, he offers us a new understanding of freedom. "Autonomy" can contain an unbalanced equation of freedom and power. When God presents us with his own freedom in the reality of his Incarnate Son, freedom and power are placed in relation to truth, which is love. Without this relation freedom is always in danger of becoming the brutal imposition of an unaccountable will. This is the old determinism that ordains the survival of the fittest and it corrupts all our relationships. Now, as Nietzsche accurately saw, Christianity and its ethic of the Kingdom destabilises this order of the strong, announcing its end. In Christ, God creates freedom, he does not destroy it. God, who comes to us with unexpected humility, is born, lives and dies in poverty, does not choose to overpower us but offers us an utterly new possibility. God does not confront us with a boundary, he presents us with an infinite horizon. He calls us into a deeper freedom and love by giving us the greatest freedom of all: the self-emptying of love beyond the bonds of family, nation and self-interest; beyond the accumulation of wealth or security for the sake of the good, especially the good of those who are the weakest and the most despised, those who have no freedom or power or anything to commend them except that they too are his image. Then, if necessary, to give joyously one's life for them. This is not weakness but a freedom that bestows on us the gift of glory. It is the transcendence which offers us life. In Advent we can begin to see what this may mean.

A secular world wants us to believe its version of our story. It wants us to look at the statistics for "religion" and see there a story of inevitable decline. If this is all we see and how we think, then we ourselves have begun to be secularised. We have been exiled to a strange wintry land where we cannot sing the Lord's song. At the heart of Advent is the figure of Mary. She is the one who attends to the Word and knows that whatever the circumstances, no matter how improbable things may seem, "nothing is impossible for God". Her Advent is both a waiting and an attentive readiness. Like any mother, it is a time of preparation for the child that grows within her. It is a time of learning, especially learning about herself. She knows that the life within her is already changing her and her body. So it is with the rhythms of faith and history. The life of the Spirit grows, often in hidden ways when all the signs are contrary. In these times we are not dying or declining, we are being made ready; we are learning anew who we are and what supreme mystery we carry. A secular world can describe us; it may seek to dismiss us, but it does not write our story. It cannot judge the life of the Spirit or the work that God is doing in His people.