I am aware that the penitential nature of Advent is under question, if not attack. More and more the churches are listening to the world and pushing back the celebration of Christmas into this season.
In the 4th century the western church adopted the eastern practice of baptizing on Epiphany (where the feast commemorated the baptism of Jesus, not the visit of Magi). There came with this practice some impetus to create for it a period of intense preparatory reflection, a type of mini-lent. The Sunday liturgies of Advent in the Book of Common Prayer reflect this. They were designed to open to prayer the ways the Holy seeks us out—in the triumph of its being there, in its sudden and definitive interjection, in the questionings of the heart, in the wonders of care. But from every one of these portals, the cry is to repent.
I realize repentance is, regrettably, not a topic in vogue, a situation undoubtedly due to some very negative imaging. Our relationship with God has too often been set in terms of a judicial system. God sets down laws, we fail to keep the laws, we are arrested by conscience, set upon to feel the weight of our outrage, our offence against God, and to face the demands of the residue of restitutional justice left us after Christ’s merciful substitution for us in his suffering and death. If this image of being hauled into court is the image we are given to live with day in and day out, it certainly makes for a woeful existence. No one wants to live in court or in prison. No one wants to expend their life beating their chest and crying “woe is me”. Thankfully, despite the chain rattling of a brace of theologians, neither God nor Jesus Christ wants that either
Do not misread me. There is certainly room in every life to look upon what has been done or not done, to feel the weight of sorrow, even revulsion. My inquiry, however, rests upon the nature of our relationship with God in Christ. Our relationship with God in Christ is personal not judicial. The early disciples understood God in Christ in terms of their temple cult of substitutionary sacrifice. Sin deserves death, God spares us death by allowing us to substitute something, and the ultimate something is someone, God’s Christ. But, at the same time there was another approach to sin, a personal approach. The Hebrew prophets had begun speaking not of Judge, but Wounded Lover, not of offering up broken cattle, but a broken heart. We are no longer in a court of law, we are in a relationship, a personal relationship complete with all the frailties and foibles that tend to undermine and threaten unless kept in check through loving reflection and open dialogue, or as traditional theology would say, through examination of conscience and repentance. Lest those nasty terms be the last word, allow me to repeat. Personal relationships, and our relationship with God in Christ is personal, require loving reflection and open dialogue to keep them alive and healthy.
We all know sorrow and shame for something. We know we have in some times, in some places, in some ways, failed others and ourselves, failed to be there, failed to listen, to care, to do. We can ignore such things only at the peril of becoming relation-less or un-relatable. We can fixate on such things and become celebrations of our own morosity. We can reflect upon such things, accept them in sorrow and resolve to learn from that and move forward.
In this process of reflecting, owning, and moving forward, the identity of the offended party is an essential element. The more intimate the relationship, the more valued the relationship, the more deeply I will feel the pain I have inflicted, the more deeply I will feel the lack of worth I bring to the relationship, and the more deeply will I realize the value, the trust, the love within the relationship that causes my offence to not only pain me, but to call me out of that pain to renewal, to moving on, to restoration wherein I am more attuned to what I do, more at-one (atoned) with the one I have offended. I have been discussing failure in terms of personal relationship because we can only fail a person, be that person oneself, another, a society of others.
Repentance is rightly presented in religion as a daily exercise. We need regularly pause to reflect, to assay the landscape of life and adjust direction (in body, mind and soul) according to the ultimate goal. It cannot be denied that any exercise worthy the name will involve some sacrifice of time, energy, effort, discipline, and pain. But, without that sacrifice we will tend, at best, to subsist rather than exist. I think most of us allow a moment for the morning physical ritual of stretching, looking in the mirror, espying the scale, assessing the situation, and making the resolutions required. I think many of us have lost the practice of doing the same regarding the soul. As physical exercise strengthens and attunes to body, spiritual exercise hones the soul. The more practiced the spirit, the more comprehensive the vision will be, the more capable of objective critique the mind and heart. That in itself makes not, however, for malaise or morosity. There is groundwork here for objectivity, and objectivity makes for sound judgment, healthful living, enlivened relationships.
I know some who all but fall over when they hear the line from the morning and evening confession “there is no health in us”. Yet for me it is a paean, an anthem. I know how piteously little “me” is. I know how greatly that “me” is transformed and transfigured by the love and care of others, how much it owes to the nurturing and sacrifices of others. I know that celebrating with gratitude that lopsided dialogue wherein I am always receiving more ever than I feel I have to give is a grace in itself—and that opens the heart of repentance. Love is humbling. Repentance knows what humble means.
I have considered repentance in an open forum as an aspect of relational correction. But what does it mean to experience this relational correction before God? Where do I, we, humanity have to stand confronted with the Holy One, the one we are called to imitate? We are told not only where to stand but how to stand. “Take off your shoes, the ground on which you stand is holy.” Take off your shoes: nothing is to come between us and the ground whereon we stand–our present, our past. We must touch it without filter. This is mine. Yet this “mine” is now confronted with the Holy, and that Holy is not only forcing my radical possession of my ground, the Holy is transforming this ground under my feet, making it holy. This is the ground for fear and trembling, for who am I before “I am”. This is the ground for joy and gratitude, for that which is under my feet is under them, and the path ahead is open, and by the creative Word, free of the burden of having to drag all things past with me. By standing before the Holy and possessing the past, it is transformed from stone in my shoe to the rock from which I venture forth to grow, to continue to grow, in sure trust, in living hope, in humble and joyful love.