Be still and know that I am God. ~ Psalm 46:10

Advent:
the time to listen for footsteps –
you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
~ Bill McKibben

It is the nature of each and all metaphors to work and not work. When we said of our childhood friend, “Tommy’s big as a house” it worked as a grammatical device to emphasize Tommy was a big dude for a third grader, but it didn’t work as well for the realtor to put a FOR SALE sign on Tommy to elicit interest from the young couple looking for a home with a front porch, three bedrooms, and a back yard.

So be mindful of this when I say that ADVENT is a season conducive to recalibrating the human heart, and then ask you to imagine that in the same heart, there is one atrium in the upper chamber and one ventricle in the lower chamber that are mystical and an atrium in the other upper chamber and another ventricle in the other lower chamber that are prophetic. The two atria receive incoming blood and the two ventricles pump blood out. You and I— this is how we’re made.

Now imagine that both the mystical and prophetic atriums receive incoming love and both the mystical and prophetic ventricles pump love out. This is why we’re made. This is one way to frame the relationship between the contemplative and active or the mystical and prophetic dimensions of faith that are integral to living a human and holy life.

Advent invites us to slow down, stop running, and be still. It summons us to an embodied silence in service to deep listening. Deep listening (otherwise known as contemplative prayer) means listening with our heart, not our ears, or as St. Benedict has it “with the ear of your heart.” Deep listening with the heart involves learning the language of silence which is the language of the heart and the first language of the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being. This deep listening into the silence is at the service of being attentively present which enables us to be one with the One who is Real Presence. In the silence, our deep listening and attentive presence, in turn, direct us toward the enactment of love that runs deep and spreads wide. The contemplative and active lives are not in opposition to one another as the metaphor and symbol of the human heart show. They are intimately related and are two dimensions of one human heart that physically keeps us alive and spiritually receives and gives love.

The hushed stillness, generous listening, and intimate attentive presence that Advent evokes allow us to hear and feel the rhythmic beating of the divine heart by which we set or reset the rate and rhythm of our own. Especially in this first week of Advent, it is a timely opportunity to check the condition of our heart, its rate and rhythm of beating, and whether there might be any little or large blockages that prevent us from receiving the fullness of God’s love or from circulating that love out to others. In the ongoing graced work of attuning our hearts to the heartbeat of God that pumps life to all the other parts of the body, we learn by experience not only who God is but who we are in and through God’s love. It’s one privileged place where we learn to love—God, ourselves, our neighbor, and the natural world which the Creator uses to sustain us.

The image of the human heart reveals the circulatory wisdom of Divine love dynamically and mutually exchanged in the Beloved Community (Trinity), transfused to us, and from us to others like the pricked blood of one child’s finger pressed against the poked droplet of blood from another. The inner logic of the self-gift of divine love as expressed in the exchange of life and love in the Trinity, shared with us in and through the incarnation of that love in Jesus, and kept alive by the ongoing inspiration of the one Spirit is especially celebrated during the Advent-Christmas seasons and reminds us that what goes around comes around. To throw another metaphor into the mix, once we have been touched by the hand of Love in the ultimate game of tag, there is only one thing for us to do—it’s why we’re here—go tag someone else. Pass it on. Hodie!

ARTWORK: (Top) Käthe Kollwitz, Praying Woman

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