Each season of the church’s year gives us a particular slant on Christian spirituality. Over the last couple of weeks, we have talked about Advent being about the fact that Christianity is incomplete; we are still waiting and watching for the ways in which the Lord keeps coming. He has not finished what he came into our world to do.
There is an echo of this in our own personal spiritual life. One of the suggested readings for Advent is from St Anselm way back in the 11th century. He ponders our seeking for God and our desire for God. He writes: “Lord, you are my God and my Lord, and never have I seen you. You have created me and recreated me and you have given me all the good things I possess and still I do not know you. In fine, I was made in order to see you, and I have not yet accomplished what I was made for.”
Anselm expresses for us our incomplete situation before God. We already believe and we know God in faith, but this knowing is not yet what it is meant to be. Our relationship with God is not yet fulfilled. We are on our pilgrim way to that full relationship.
This relating to God is not just about the saints who are canonised. It is about ‘the saints’ in the New Testament sense of the word, that is all of those who are already in contact with Christ. We know him in faith but we look to that time which St John in his first letter describes in the following words: “See what great love the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God’s children and that is what we are!… We are already God’s children, but what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We know that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.” (I John 3. 1-2).
So it is that we live energetically in the present and we look to the future in which we shall see that in which we now believe.
St Anselm concludes his thoughts by praying: “Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek you if you do not teach me how, nor find you unless you reveal yourself. Let me seek you in desiring you, let me desire you in seeking you; let me find you in loving you, let me love you in finding you.”
And so it is that we live trusting ourselves into God’s hands and being confident that he will lead us to himself.
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Ray says:
A lovely piece of Advent writing, Fr Frank. Your quoting of St Anselm is particularly telling. I shall read it several times in the coming week.