The First Advent before First Advent SSR #13

​“For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.”
- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

“If the book of Genesis were rewritten today, how would the story begin? In light of what the new science tells us, it might begin something like this: “In the beginning was God, filled with power and mystery, and God spoke one Word, and the Word exploded into a tiny, hot, dense ball of matter that gave rise to forces and fields, quarks and particles, all joined together like a single strand of thread.”
- Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution

“God is the prodigal who squanders himself.”
​- Karl Rahner, The Theology of Christmas


This week I am sharing two songs, because sometimes illustrations need different angles, shading and texture to paint a fuller Big Picture.

First, we will listen to First Advent (Ex Nihilo), (or perhaps I could call it The Birth of the Universe, Out of Nothing ) in which we hearken back to the mystery of origin. We currently call this the Big Bang, which cosmologists are saying happened close to 14 billion years ago.

For generations, the mystics and the poets and most earth-based traditions have been inadvertently comfortable with big bang cosmology, and would have been quite “at home” with many scientists today.

Normally, “first advent” is seen as the coming of the Christ child. So some folks might take issue with those who are rewinding the narrative so many billions of years back, but likewise, other folks might find it very helpful.

As a point of clarity, in this reflection, when I say “first advent” I’m speaking to the incarnate mystery of origin itself. When I say “second advent” I am referring to the Christ child, Jesus. And when I say “third advent” I am referring to the Christ Omega.

So travel with me if you will, back to the murky area, before that one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, and before the first sub atomic nuclei formed, approximately three minutes after the Big Bang and before the first stars began to shine about 300 million years after the Big Bang. Then on and on, to the expanding universe in which we find ourselves today.

There is a theory that mystery of origin is a “something from nothing”. Other theories imagine that our Big Bang is the result of another contracting universe preceding this expanding one. Whatever the case, the farther we reach back, there is this humbling vastness to the plot, that is incredibly ancient, but really quite new to us.

Just reading about this vastness requires our imaginations to open up. So, through the lens of ancient mystics and poets and philosophers, I sat with this beautiful concept of “ creatio ex nihilo”, the idea that creation came “out of nothing”.

As a songwriter, what I like about working with “ex nihilo” as a self-emptying, loving, pre-matter energy, is that it simultaneously says that love manifested all of this, but that we cannot destroy love because it precedes existence. And then, as a songwriter, I work with evolution as a complex, trial and error, participatory, incarnate thing.

Here is the song First Advent:

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The second song Prophet’s Candle is also a brand new chant, written for today, the first Sunday of Advent in which the first of the Advent candles, (the Prophet’s Candle),  is lit in the darkness of expectancy and longing.

We light a candle for the ancient prophets
And sing hymns of longing
for the Fruit of the root
of the Jesse tree

And the Spirit of the Lord rested on him

We light a candle for the ancient prophets
And chant hymns of longing
for the Fruit of the root
of the Jesse tree

May the Spirit of the Lord rest upon us

As we contemplate the humbling vastness of first advent, and the prophecy of conscious incarnation growing in the darkness of Mary’s willing womb, as second advent, and the Christ Omega singing us ever forward as third advent in us…  may we plunge into this womb-dark time, with the willingness to be shaped and formed anew. With sober sincerity, offering up our yearning for abundant, verdantly fertile, healing and life.

To yearn for this is not yearning to live a risk-free life! We are a heritage of fire that converged into teeming, ever-converging life. Symbiosis is not without some tooth and claw. We are careening through space and time. Tonight, here in zone 2a, above the 49th parallel, the stars are magnificent, and I can hear their incantations for greater convergence, even as I know they are great burning balls of gas. The fact that they are does not destroy the poetry of star gazing.

Incarnation has to be plunged into the very realities of life and death and risk, and of darkness and light, to be incarnation. This is a seedy, soiled, dripping, hoofed, pawed, finned, fingernailed, pulsating, fleshy business. A lying in a straw bed manger, visible breath of animal nostrils, and a birth blood soaked earthen floor, business. 

And it is into this gritty life-filled reality that the great self-emptying Lover has poured.
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