Advent leads us to Christmas. Christmas is essentially meaningful for us Christians for one reason: we meet God who comes in the person of Jesus. This coming of God can only mean something to us when we actually encounter that God in the most intimate and personal way. Suppose Billy Joel or a very famous celebrity came near us. Does it matter to us? Not really, unless there’s a personal encounter with us. In this sense, for Advent to have any spiritual impact on us, we want to make sure who we are longing to encounter. While we celebrate and give thanks to God for his coming to us in the person of Jesus, we also want to meet this God in our lives. During this Advent, our spiritual aim is then quite clear. We want to meet Jesus.
This spiritual aim or goal to meet him begs the question. In what sense do we anticipate to meet? Do we mean that we meet him in person like you and I meet or like the crucified and risen Christ showing his wounds to Thomas? Perhaps. But this actually doesn’t change us. Just because we meet someone, that encounter does not transform us. That relationship is superficial in that we do not really get to know that person. So, even if we meet Jesus in person, this doesn’t guarantee we will be transformed. Let’s not forget that all those eyewitnesses in the gospel stories who saw the risen Christ did not necessarily believe in him. Unless our heart is awake, nothing happens. If we are spiritually blind and lax, we wouldn’t sense anything and anyone around us. Let’s think about some relationships that have an actual impact on us. Friendships we treasure and cherish can be one. We have friends who we deeply care and love. One of the reasons why this friendship you have with your friend is so precious and meaningful is that you and your friends have walked together through joys and sorrows, all the ups and downs. That friend of yours has been there for you. You and your friends have spent time through all kinds of events in all your lives. You walk on the path together. Isaiah in the first lesson knows the importance of this journey of walking together. He says, “...that God may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths...let us walk in the light of the Lord.” This act of walking together isn’t different with God. Do we want to get to know God? We walk in God’s paths. Do we want to get to meet Jesus? We must walk in his paths. We are to walk the walk of Jesus. We follow his spiritual footsteps which led to the cross. Jesus’s walk, his way was led by the Holy Spirit according to the will of the Father. Recently, I had a chance to watch an independent movie, “Find me.” The storyline is quite simple. Joe and Amelia work together. They are actually more than colleagues to each other that they are sort of best buddies at work. After a painful divorce, Joe is isolated and lonely, having no social life and ordering the same food every evening after work, “Chicken combo, steamed veggies and fries.” One day, his friend Amelia is gone. Apparently, she’s embezzled thousands of dollars from the company and donated it all to charity! Joe waits and waits but months pass by. Finally, one day he receives a letter from her, which is an instruction with the note, “Find me.” He takes vacation days which he hasn’t taken for years and is in search for Amelia. He follows Amelia’s traces through the notes of instruction at each designation. In his search for his friend, he experiences the beauty of Zion National Park, Death Valley, Yosemite, and other sites which Amelia also loves. He gets to know her deeper and love what she loves. I won’t spoil the movie. The point of my sharing this movie story with you is it shows what it’s like to walk in the path of someone. Advent is the very first starting point of this journey to deepen our relationship with Jesus. It is the walk, not just to meet Jesus at the end but to see what he sees, to hear what he hears, and to experience what he experiences in his relationship with the Father on his journey led by the Holy Spirit. This walking in his path is not metaphorical or rhetorical. We’re invited to walk this walk. We are to get in his boat and put ourselves in his shoes. This is the only way to know him, meet him, and experience the Father he experienced. As you know me, I’m all about how we actually do this walk. How do we walk in Jesus’s path? Jesus and Paul give us the clue in today’s lessons. Jesus tells us, “Keep awake.” Paul commands us, “Now is the time to wake up from sleep.” A spiritual sense of waking up from sleep is like the overturning of our entire selves. It’s like getting up from bed every morning. We get up and shower, not just to make ourselves presentable to others but to fully wake up and begin a new day. This spiritual wake-up that both Jesus and Paul talk about opens up something completely different and life-changing in us. This may be experienced as a life-and-death experience in a spiritual sense. We discover something radically different in us when we are awakened by the Holy Spirit. What we used to believe to be ourselves and how we used to identify ourselves will totally change. They are gone. We might have believed we are our thoughts or we are our feelings. But this is no longer true. We are not our thoughts. We are not our feelings. We are not our senses. Instead, only the Holy Spirit in us defines our entire selves. Each of us carries something eternal which is not just a part but a whole. I believe this is what Jesus experienced first and journeyed to the cross. The Holy Spirit assures in us our true identity that does not change. This experience of the Holy Spirit is not merely about having the Holy Spirit breathed into us. A mid 20th century Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani says quite powerfully, “...our very being becomes ‘God-breathed’ through the breath (spiration) of God.” (Religion and Nothingness, p. 28) I say this is powerful and thought-provoking that the Holy Spirit is not merely a part of who we are. But our entire being is ‘God-breathed’ that the Holy Spirit is that which creates and defines who we are. It is the whole. That’s why a French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can say, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And we all know basic human experiences consist of thinking, feeling, and sensing, which is the function of the ego. When we truly experience the Holy Spirit who defines us and is our being, our ego is sort of born again as God’s children. (The sacrament of Baptism expresses this very transformation of our ego to God’s children ritually and publicly whereas the Eucharist visualizes and manifests that very divine nature that defines us in the body and blood of Jesus.) I hope I have made myself clear so far. Advent is the very beginning of our walk with and to Jesus. To walk in his path, we need to get up from bed and wake up. And to walk in his path is nothing but to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and put on the armor of light as Paul says. But then, I still haven’t answered the question of how to keep awake or how to wake up from sleep. Here’s what I want to share with you which might help you get in touch with the Holy Spirit who is your being. I would like us to close our eyes for a moment: "You are to wonder regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead people would also hear sounds. . . . You must wonder or get curious deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be. . . . Only be curious more and more deeply . . . without intending to experience the Holy Spirit and without even intending not to intend to hold the Spirit; become like a child in your own breast. . . . But however you go on wondering, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. Continue to become curious deeply in a state of single-mindedness, . . . becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. You will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Wonder, “What is the subject that hears?” and asks still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Wonder but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of wonder and curiosity, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment or the perpetual presence of the Holy Spirit, as if you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived or resurrected." (Paraphrased from Religion and Nothingness, pp. 20-21) With this experience, we begin our journey to meet Jesus and love him deeper. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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