The Great Bending Down

We enter a new liturgical year and the great season of Advent. It is a twilight time, a time of fertile darkness, a time of waiting, of looking for something. Culturally we find ourselves in a kind of mist. We strain to make sense of what is going on. So what are we waiting for in 2020?

We want peace…we want order…we want truthfulness and honesty. We want to be saved…from ourselves. Advent is a time of hope, a time that tells us that what we want is already on the way. It’s message centers on the birth of a baby, not an army, not a new foreign policy, but a baby.

The Mystery that is saving us bends down, wrapping itself in our DNA. Infinity binds itself in littleness. We ponder this, amazed. We know what’s coming. There will be the growing up, the ordinary eating, sleeping, being in the family. There will be living the limits of being able to do only so much. Then there will be the bending into rejection, arrest, conviction, and execution. And because such love can’t die, it takes one more step down. It finds a way to stay with us in the struggle, it becomes our food, strength for the journey, our bread.

What is this bending down of our God? Are we fools, to preach a God who wants to be eaten?

Or is this the epitome of wisdom, to present a God who is bent on making us divine? So we enter into the Great Bending Down. We slowly become what we eat. And the Baby laughs.

Little mite, who charms us,

You lure us to bend our stiff necks and rigid backs

To capture us in a perennial kiss!