Advent Reflections

Each day in Advent, you will receive an email from St. Barnabas with words and images to invite your engagement with the season’s themes of longing and hope, preparation and expectation, listening and silence. Many of the images will not be traditional “religious” art. Advent calls us to notice the signs of God in unexpected places.   We invite you to prayerfully contemplate the images and absorb the words. Consider returning to them at various times during the day, letting them speak into the moment. Perhaps you will hear a word meant just for you.

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December 9th, 2019

Revelation 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” What do Alpha and Omega mean in Advent? At least in part they signify that while we talk about an ending, we are also talking about a beginning, the immanent and the transcendent. Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, are not like the first and last letters of our alphabet, delineating the range of communication in Roman script. Alpha and Omega do not indicate parameters or limits. No, they indicate a reality that is beyond our conceptual grasp: a Being who is and was and is to come, an illimitable Being who, as theologian John Macquarrie stated, lets being be.

Religion is an art form that attempts to make sense of something that is outside human experience, beyond our conceptual grasp. As Karen Armstrong writes in her latest book, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts , “ Homo sapiens is the only animal with the ability to envisage something that is not immediately apparent or has not yet come to be….Neurologists tell us that in fact we have no direct contact with the world we inhabit. We have only perspectives that come to us through the intricate circuits of our nervous system, so that we all---scientists as well as mystics---know only representations of reality, not reality itself. We deal with the world as it appears to us, not as it intrinsically is.” We can look back in history to see how being manifests in the immanent; but works of art attempt to make sense of the mystery of our existence, of that which is beyond the immanent. The transcendent can only be described metaphorically, as when two unalike things are brought together to assert a new identity. Consider the art and architecture of fifth and sixth century Ravenna, Italy. The mosaics of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the church of  Sant’Apollinare in Classe demonstrate that Christian artists of the fifth and sixth century, well-versed in sacred scripture, were gifted with the ability to invoke the coming of the Lord for those with eyes to see.

A subtler metaphor of the immanent and the transcendent can be found in the San Marco Convent, Florence, Italy. There between 1438 and 1445, Fra Angelico painted frescos for reflection in the cells of each of the monks.  Noli me Tangere (“Do not hold on to me,” John 20:17) portrays the encounter of Mary Magdalene with the resurrected Jesus. They are in a garden, a garden where the barrier between heaven and earth is broken open. For this garden is scattered with flowers whose centers are red from the blood of Christ. Here are depicted human beings participating in the beginning and the end, a new Eden reaching toward eternity. The Alpha and the Omega.

Reflection by The Reverend Dr. Judith McDaniel