Advent Journal: The Way to Freedom for All of Us

There are phases to a life, like there are phases to the moon. Flavors to a season of writing, the way Halloween had a flavor as a child, or Christmas. In Advent, I am happy and a little reckless. When you know the way God is alive and Christ afoot, then the work changes. It stops being work, really. It takes no time at all to be as God created you, and God does not make mistakes, nor drafts that need editing or other changes. Happiness is serious, inclusive and disciplined, naturally so. Have you met Jesus?

I ask that seriously. In Advent – this season of readying ourselves for his arrival in the world, which signifies a new way of being in time together – what I don’t quite say is, you can learn how to see Jesus. Seeing him is like seeing justice or a birthday or a pet. Not until I could see Jesus, clearly and unequivocally, did the change begin. And even then it took some time. Takes time? All he asks is that I be a willing learner.

Last year, I don’t remember the precise date, but Jasper read something on my substack and said, brother, one of these days, you’re going to have to come out to these folks as Catholic. And in the slant-wise nature of truth (lauds and praise, Sister Emily, lauds and praise), I haven’t thought about much else since. I haven’t been to church for myself in what? A quarter century now?

And yet.

Morning deepens – three o’clock, now four, now five. Soon the day will begin. The prayer cycles closer to amen, as it must.

Jesus doesn’t call me to church but to writing and, by extension, to teaching. This is our shared calling; we are here together. Teaching – like psychotherapy, to which it is closely related – is an expression of honesty. Whatever formal role it assumes, its whole function is to bring us together to honesty. But honesty about what? And the answer is, honesty about talking about what is missing and how to live in its absence. But what is missing? Well, you tell me. Because for me, increasingly, nothing is missing. Not even the haunting, hard-to-scratch sense that something is missing is missing. And yet here we are.

When you know nothing is missing (even if you still kind of suspect that something is missing), and you know that God is alive and Christ afoot, then the tides of ego obscuring both moon and sea, soften a little. You see the moon and the sea, and know the tide as an effect. A predictable effect, a measurable effect. “We are in this together” means something a little different. It doesn’t mean there’s a crisis and we’ll solve it together. It means that learning situations abound and this is one of them, yet again. What do you want to learn? I ask myself this question constantly. So does Jesus. Constantly.

What do you want to learn is related to what do you want to teach. We can sharpen that a little. What you want to teach is related to what you want to give away – and what you want to give away is related to what you think you need. Generally, the various answers to all these questions sugar out in the concept of relationship. Beyond the specificity of form – we are lovers, we are friends, you are my therapist, I am your teacher, we use familial lingo like “brother” and “sister,” whatever – lies relationship. A word pointing to a concept that points to . . . what exactly? And why are we all fighting over it?

I joined the battle when and the way I did because I didn’t want to be an object. I insisted on subjectivity. Nor did I consider time a friend or ally. I was a child! And so decades passed in an expanding compounding error (related to subjectivity and objectivity) that I could not see and, on the rare occasion when I did catch a glimpse, I didn’t understand. I thought the mind and the body were separate; I thought it was possible to move through the world unattached and unaffected; I thought the rules changed according to social status; and I thought these things were desirable because they were fundamentally right in some way, over and against anything else.

A turtle or so down then, the problem was my conviction it was possible to be right at all with respect to remembering God’s Love. God’s Love burns the right/wrong binary (e.g., the lovelessness of “I get it and you don’t”) to ash! Really, the problem was my misinterpretation of somebody else’s misinterpretation all the way back to the garden. That’s what saved me, by the way – the realization that the world I was living in was my misinterpretation of the misinterpretation of others – parents, teachers, priests, gurus, whatever. Jesus corrects that interpretation. Or rather, learning how to see Jesus allows me to correct that interpretation, which really really means just noticing that it is an interpretation. When I saw that, I saw the way to freedom for all of us. It was obvious; it was simple; it was given.

“Obvious, simple and given” because you are given. You are always given. You are always here, ready to listen, ready to remind me to rest, ready to go over what I’m learning in order to purify and perfect it, ready to remind me that “purify” and “perfect” are tricky and often slip us up. Et cetera. You are you – a reader, a fellow traveler, a distant observer taking notes for later, or something else altogether. To share in the way we do eclipses time and space, bringing both to the holy instant where they gently dissolve in relationship. I write and you read but something – but what – is fully present now, for both of us. The writing isn’t it but the writing does reflect it – but what “it” is can only be present, can only be reflected the way it is, because we both know it and consent to its presence. Together we create it. This is it.