The Third Monday in Advent -- Evelyn Underhill

A Reflection on Evelyn Underhill’s The Light of the World (pp. 168-75)

As we expectantly await the arrival of Christmas during this season of Advent, our focus naturally is on the events leading from the Annunciation – the angel Gabriel delivering the astonishing news to the unassuming Mary – to the birth of the infant Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. And these events are indeed breathtaking enough. God becoming human, the transcendent joining with the homely, in the mystery of the Incarnation.

But Evelyn Underhill reminds us that Christmas is actually a season, twelve wonderful days extending from the Nativity to the Epiphany, and that there is a spiritual coherence to this stretch of time. As she explains: “The Christmas mystery has two parts: the nativity and the epiphany. A deep instinct made the Church separate these two feasts. In the first we commemorate God’s humble entrance into human life, the emergence and birth of the holy, and in the second its manifestation to the world, the revelation of the supernatural made in that life.” (171)

The people of Israel long expected a Messiah, and we know that Jesus’ birth is the fulfillment of that long-awaited promise. But what doesn’t become clear until the Epiphany is that this Messiah is not just the Anointed One of the Hebrew people, but in fact a light to the whole world, Gentiles and all the rest of humanity included. All of those people who had once felt outside the special relationship between God and his chosen people are now suddenly and mysteriously drawn in.

“Think of what the Gentile was when these words were written,” Underhill writes, “an absolute outsider. All cozy religious exclusiveness falls before that thought. The Light of the world is not the sanctuary lamp in your favorite church.” (171) “A Savior is born to us,” Luke proclaims – but the “us” are not just the insiders, but the outsiders too. Everyone.

And just as there is an external logic to this arc from Incarnation to Epiphany, God’s birth to his manifestation to all, so too, Underhill insists, should there be an internal logic within us. Christ seeks to be born in each of our hearts, but not just so we may possess him (as if that were a possibility!); but rather so that we might manifest his radiance to the those around us. “The birth of Christ in our souls is for a purpose beyond ourselves: it is because his manifestation in the world must be through us.” (173)

God’s invitation to you this Christmas season is thus a two-part one: first, how will you allow Christ to be reborn in your heart? And second, how will you make him manifest to the world around you? The gift of Christmas will not be complete until we do both.

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was a British Anglo-Catholic mystic and writer.

Comments

  1. graceDecember 19, 2017 at 5:49 PM

    Not hard to allow a helpless baby into our hearts, but harder perhaps to reach past our own fears to make Him manifest to the world around us?

    ReplyDelete

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