Читать книгу Our December Hearts - Anne McConney - Страница 8

Somewhere near the Eve of Saint Andrew I like to sit near a window and watch the day end. The winter twilight is short and comes early. The light seeps away into the west and the dark comes silently like some soft and gentle creature.

Since I have never believed that spiritual thinking is improved by discomfort—an idea surely born in drafty northern castles and cathedrals—I sit snug and sweatered and with a warm drink at hand. As the light drains from my part of the world, I begin my entry into Advent.

For Advent is the road into Christmas and Christmas is the great feast of Incarnation. We declare with song and ritual and pageantry the belief that the God of the cosmos, the same God who created the strange and spectacular starscapes revealed by our latest technology, also created a human family and then came as a newborn baby to join it. “It behooveth us to know our self,” writes the Blessed Julian of Norwich, “for when we know our self, we shall fully and truly know our God.” We too are incarnate—in flesh—and we must sound the depths of our own being before we can speak of how human nature can be joined to the nature of God.

What does it mean to be human? This is the single all-engrossing subject we study all our lives, the daunting question we ask of the universe and the universe asks of us.

There is a moment that is unlike any other in our lives, and I think it comes to most of us at a very early age: the moment we say “I” and then “why?” I remember when it came to me as a child, at a time as unlike an Andrew's Eve twilight as one could imagine.

The day is hot and blindingly bright, high summer with the sun in power blistering the paint on the front steps, burning my feet through my sneakers. Somewhere in the picture there are crayons, broken and spilled and melting into little rainbow puddles on the front walk. I have a vague awareness that my mother will not be happy, either about the wasted crayons or the wax on the walk, but I cannot care. I do not have time for such matters; I am engaged, body, mind and soul, in a higher enterprise.

I am looking at a tree pierced with sunlight and filled with shadowed deeps. I sit in my head like a pilot in a cockpit; I look out through my eyes as if they were windows and think I am I; I say it over and over to myself—a mantra, a mystery, finally almost a trance. I fall into the center of myself and find no way out. Why? What magic of the universe has placed me here? Why am I not sitting in some other brain and looking at some other tree? Why am I here at all? The wonder is too large to hold.

The moment comes to us all. Somewhere, somehow, we speak the God-word, the “I am,” and the world turns around. We have moved across the divide between seeing the tree and “I am seeing the tree.” We are apprenticed to our humanity and will be for the rest of our lives.

There is grief in this as well as wonder. We have claimed our humanity and lost the world; from this day onward we will see the tree, but only in rare and fast-fleeing moments will we be at one with the tree. No one will ever be me and I will never be anyone else. When we have recognized our own consciousness—and the consciousness of others—we have learned the basic distinction of life: the I and the not-I.

This distinction is the key to every relationship we will ever have, with human or beast or God, and the moment it comes to us, in blazing summer or deep winter, is our Saint Andrew's Eve. It is the point-instant from which we begin our exploration of what it means to be human—to live in flesh and time and the community of our fellows—and of what it might mean to believe that God became human too.

The day is gone now; full darkness lies across the land; the lights of the town are blinking on. Behind every yellow-bright window there is a human being, a life, a mystery.

It is time to get up from my chair, time to turn on my own lights, time to return to the pragmatic and practical world. It is time to think about dinner.