Go Ye Out To Meet Him

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning[1].

T.S. Eliot is not my favorite poet (far from it, in fact!).

Nor does he belong to my favorite school of poets nor to my favorite period of literature. But these seven lines of poetry, from the fourth and final of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, are (perhaps) my favorite seven lines in all English verse.

I’m not sure exactly why.

But I think it has something to do with the fact that, the longer I live, the more I realize just how inexhaustibly true and universally applicable is the paradox of which they speak:

the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Life can do that to us (if we’re attentive and really engaged).

Somehow, it can bring us back to a “place” — whether a geographic location, a state of mind, or even a relationship — where we’ve been before, familiar to us, and charged with meaning… with old, well-established meaning.

And, being back, we experience the tension of this paradox: “Here again! Right back to where I was before! Has all that I’ve gone through really just been a huge, long (perhaps life-long) circle? Does it really end right where it started?”

But then — if we’re lucky — we notice it: strangely, everything that is so familiar looks so radically different now.

When the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning.

Today, my sisters, brothers, and siblings, on this Sunday morning, [despite yesterday’s election of our rector as the next bishop of the Diocese of California,] we are not at the end, but rather the beginning.

Yes, the beginning of Advent — the season of preparation for the coming feast of Christmas — but, indeed, the beginning of the Church’s entire liturgical calendar.

Today, the First Sunday of Advent, liturgically speaking, is “New Year’s Day.”

The whole cycle of Christian feasts and seasons, the celebration of the story of our salvation, begins again today, anew, afresh.

And yet we find ourselves standing, once more, in a very familiar “place.”

Not just because many of us have been right here in this beautiful church of St. Paul’s Within-the-Walls many times before; and not just because many of us have started this season of Advent many times before; but because this Sunday’s beginning is strikingly similar to last Sunday’s end.

Last Sunday, the Church Universal celebrated the feast of Christ the King, with which the liturgical year — last liturgical year — drew to a close.

And the readings, prayers, and music of that feast last Sunday drew our attention to that “Omega Point”[2] of all history “when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, [when] he will sit on the throne of his glory” and “all the nations will be gathered before him”[3].

And today, in the Gospel reading, we hear Jesus speaking of that same future time when “the stars will be falling from heaven,” when “they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory,” when “he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven”[4].

Advent beings with the end, emphasizing not the coming of Christ in the recorded past, but Christ’s coming in the unrecorded yet-to-be.

But, truth be told, much like Bishop-Elect Austin said last Sunday, I just don’t feel the imminence and urgency of that coming in quite the way it seems the first Christians did — even if I know “the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect”[5]; even as I am “fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”[6].

There is a certain smugness of “now,” of being so far from the first, that the last seems at best an abstraction: one generation, maybe, at some distant point in the future might have to deal with that. But surely not mine.

Besides, we’re too busy too busy fighting our wars against our own human race, too busy destroying the only planet we’ve got, to really dwell too much on another coming of Christ!

And then, to our self-defeating smugness, comes the instruction, the command, of this Sunday’s Gospel reading: “Vegliate!” “Stay awake! Keep watch!” — repeated four times in the original Greek of that short passage.

Far from the warm-fuzzies of all those “oxen lowing, little knowing” and those “flocks sleeping” with “shepherds keeping” while “the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head” (never mind the Glühwein and the gingerbread), Advent begins as a cold and stark wake-up call!

Keep watch, stay alert, vegliate!

Okay. But what does that really mean for my life?

Well, maybe we’ve already heard the answer the answer to that practical question.

This morning, just before this Holy Eucharist, as we lit the first candle of the Advent wreath, we heard the English translation of that ancient, hauntingly beautiful Advent responsory Aspiciens a longe, which traditionally followed the first reading in the night office of Matins, prayed in the earliest hours of this First Sunday of Advent: «Aspiciens a longe et ecce video Dei potentiam venientem»(“I look from afar: and lo, I see the power of God coming”).

The verse, first sung by the cantors, names those to whom the message is addressed: High and low, rich and poor, one with another.

And then, breaks forth the response of the full choir — that is, of all of us — giving the instruction: Go ye out to meet him and say: “Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people?”

Go! Go ye out to meet him!

Yes, our God is a God who comes to us.

Always in the gerund: coming.

But our “keeping watch” doesn’t simply mean letting the long-awaited One come.

It means recognizing Them and running out to greet Them.

This is precisely the response of the five wise bridesmaids in the parable we heard three Sundays ago, who were able to rise from their tiredness at once upon hearing the midnight cry, “Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”[7].

This is precisely the response of the father of the prodigal son, who saw his son returning “while he was still a long way off […] and ran and embraced him and kissed him”[8].

High and low, rich and poor, one with another: Go ye out to meet him and say: “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”

But, once again, doesn’t such a “coming” seem so remote and unlikely?

Well, like I said, I get that.

But… what if it’s not?

I don’t mean “What if tomorrow is the end of time?”

But rather, “What if the coming of Christ — that is, the coming of my Salvation — which really matters is what Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot and theologian, in one of his Advent sermons, called the “intermediate coming”?

Bernard writes: In the first coming, he was seen on earth, dwelling among us […]. In the final coming, all flesh will see the salvation of our God […]. The intermediate coming is a hidden one; in it [we] see the Lord within [our]selves, and are saved. Listen to what our Lord himself says: If anyone loves me, they will keep my word[9], and my Father will love them, and we will come to them […]. This coming will fulfill what is written: As we have borne the likeness of the earthly one, we shall also bear the likeness of the heavenly one[10].

If old Bernard of Clairvaux is right about this “hidden coming” of the Lord, here and now, then the central message of this beginning of the new liturgical year — Keep awake! Go ye out to meet him! — finds its transformative meaning in last Sunday’s ending, when everyone in that Gospel reading, both the righteous and the accursed, asked the same question to our Savoir and God whose Advent is now here: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?”[11]

Perhaps you recall the answer: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me”[12].

We “do not know when the time will come” for that final Advent, that final coming of God at the end of history, nor would I even dare to pretend to know what it means.

But we do know the way we “keep awake” in the meantime, in this Advent of our Savior, “when the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning”: the God who comes, the God who comes in our human flesh, illegitimate and illegal, to save us, both at that first Christmas of Bethlehem and on this very day in this very city of Rome!

Go ye out to meet him!

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[1] Eliot, T.S., “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, London, 2002, p. 208.

[2] Cf. de Chardin, P.T., The Appearance of Man, Harper & Row, New York, 1965, especially pp. 244-270.

[3] Matthew 25:31-32. From the Gospel appointed for the previous Sunday’s feast of Christ the King.

[4] Mark 13:26-27. Cf. the opening words of today’s first reading from Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (64:1).

[5] Luke 12:40.

[6] 1 Thessalonians 5:2.

[7] Matthew 25:1-6.

[8] Luke 15:20.

[9] Cf. This Sunday’s Gospel reading, in which Jesus, immediately before his instruction to keep awake, says “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

[10] Bernardus Claraevallensis, Sermo 5, In Adventu Domini, 1-3: Opera Omnia, ed. Cisterc. 4, 1966, 188-190.

[11] Matthew 25:44. Cf. Matthew 25:37-39.

[12] Matthew 25:40. Cf. Matthew 25:45.