Come, Lord Jesus
“Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, awake are all appropriate! Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and forewarning about the high price of consciousness.
When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, “Why weren’t you this for me? Why didn’t life do that for me?” we are refusing to say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.
“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source, is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come in our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.
Father Richard Rhor, OMF
Preparing for Christmas, Cokebury, 2012.
Grinling Gibbons (4 April 1648 – 3 August 1721) was an English sculptor and woodcarver who often worked alongside Christopher Wren. Gibbons delicate carvings are in the Cathedral quire (choir), the first part of the Cathedral to be built and consecrated. The quire is where the choir and clergy normally sit during services. Between the bomb fragments of WWII and age, the Gibbons carvings are currently being restored. 2021 will be the 300th anniversary of the death of Gibbons and the Cathedral will host several programs to celebrate his work. More.