Our seeking to the beholding is not a matter of rejecting the particularities of creation but rather plunging into their deepest heart, allowing them wholly to draw our attention. Amor meus, pondus meum, wrote St. Augustine. Love draws everything to itself, and this radiant love is the source of all fruitfulness.4
Barking at Angels
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
A few years ago, the Bodleian Library published a Christmas card that showed the annunciation to the shepherds—or, rather, to one shepherd, standing on a hillside shielding his eyes from the glory of the herald angel. Beside him, his cheeky dog was doing what good sheepdogs do: barking at the strange intruder. It is not hard to imagine the poor shepherd, in dread and awe of this staggering vision, trying to get the dog tο shut up long enough for him to hear what the angelic messenger is saying.
I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn’t a human way of barking at angels, of driving away the signs everywhere around us: signs calling us to stop, tο wake up, tο receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention tο what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment. These signs press on us most insistently at the turning of the year, when earthly light drains from our lives and we are left wondering in the dark.
The church, from ancient times, recognized the spiritual value of this winter span of darkness and created in its liturgy what we might think of as a three-months-long Night Office, beginning with the Feast of All Saints on the first of November, and ending with Candlemas on the second of February. This season is a vast parabola of prophecy and vision, a liturgical arcing of eternity through the world’s midnight.
The readings—especially those from Isaiah and Revelation—do their best to subvert our perceptions of time and space in order to plunge us into the great stillness at the heart of things, the stillness necessary to make space for what is “ever ancient and ever new”5 to break through the clamor of our minds, tο open our hearts to the Beloved, to annunciation, and to fruition. Eternity is our dwelling place even in time, if only we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the heart to welcome. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” cry the seraphs, their voices shaking the foundations even as their ineffable wings fold us into the stillness of God (Isa 6:3).
Only in this stillness can we know eyes are being opened and ears unstopped; the lame are leaping like deer and those once silenced singing for joy; water is springing in the parched wilderness of our pain. Only as we are plunged into the depths of this obscure stillness can we know the wonderful and terrible openings of the seals and the book; the rain of the Just One; the heavens rent by angels ascending and descending; the opening of graves and gifts, of hell and the side of Christ.
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Our God, heav’n cannot hold Him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
By contrast, it is a curiously contemporary phenomenon that the public rhetoric of religion employs words such as freedom and liberty even while it is taking away our sense of wonder, crowding our minds with insistent demands, and obviating the possibility of any space for contemplation. Thus, we are invited to think about ourselves and our discontents, especially our fear, which locks us in time instead of gesturing toward eternity.
By associating God with fear, political and religious institutions encourage us to calibrate certainty by establishing rigid conceptual grids. We then try to force ourselves and our world to conform to these templates, an exercise that ends in an illusory sense of control. This tragic search for security in exterior validation makes us hostage to what other people think, especially the opinions of those who seek tο define the boundaries and content of our lives. Our anxiety is so great that even the fickle wind of chance cannot break our death-grip on the wildly vacillating weathervane of others’ opinions. This desperate clinging to convention can extend to being afraid to talk about God—or even to pray—outside carefully scripted parameters, in spite of the fact that such denatured language can twist the thoughts, words, and intentions of our hearts.
True Christianity stands in opposition to such closed systems. Its essential message is this: to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Heb 2:15). The fear of death can take many forms, most of which have little to do with what might happen after our bodies die. Rather, fear of death is a matter of the mind. It has everything to do with how we perceive and interpret our experience. Our self-consciousness generates anxieties that make us vulnerable to manipulation and coercion in every sphere of our lives, from the most trivial preoccupation with fashion to the fate of our planet. It conspires with the exploitation of fear and uncertainty that makes us complicit in inflicting physical or spiritual death on ourselves or others. Our fretful search for certainty becomes a search for numb complacency.
But faith challenges this complacency. Faith is not about suspending critique, but about exercising it as it issues from a silent space of love, a reality yet unseen (Heb 11:1). Faith is about finding security in insecurity, the realization that unless we work hard to maintain a hole in the heavens6 by which the closed universe of anxiety is breached, the fate of everything in our created world will be determined by the human fear of “death.”
The Christian antidote to the fear of death is summed up in Philippians 2:5–11, often known as the kenotic hymn. Paul’s preface is succinct: our problems originate in our anxieties. Their resolution, says Paul, is to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . .” (v. 5, my emphasis).
Christ takes on the burden of our human self-consciousness but is never trapped by its anxieties. He never loses the clarity of his gaze on the Father, the secret exchange of love in faith. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament gather this gaze and all that it implies into the single word behold. Sadly, this word has vanished from modern translations of the Bible and the liturgy, and with it has vanished the most important message that Christianity or any other religion has to offer.
Behold is the marker word throughout the Bible. It signals shifting perspective, the holding together or even the conflating of radically different points of view. It indicates the moment when the language of belief is silenced by the exaltation of faith as these paradoxical perspectives are brought together and generate, as it were, an explosion of silence and light. This silence holds us in thrall, in complete self-forgetfulness. Our settled accounting of ordinary matters is shattered and falls into nothing as light breaks upon us. Beholding is not confined to monastic cells: it is the wellspring of ordinary life transfigured.
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Enough for him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day.
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay:
Enough for Him whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which