Advent

Christian Century, Dec 5, 2001 by Heidi Neumark

So how do I remember God? Hans is very matter of fact on the subject. For him, there is no time when he, Hans, did not exist. Hans knows where he was before he was born. When Ana speaks of events that occurred during the first three years of her life, and pointedly comments: "You weren't here yet, Hans. You weren't born," Hans replies, "Oh, I know. That's when I was with God!" He speaks with absolute confidence and a trace of oneupmanship--"Well, maybe you were with Mommy and Daddy, but I was with God!"

When Hans was a baby, someone gave us a tape with world music lullabies. One of the songs had a favorite tune--music from the Andean region of Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina with reed flutes, soft drums and small guitar-like charangos. For me, it's the sound of anhelo. Whenever I played this particular lullaby, Hans would cry, so of course I stopped playing it. I thought it strange that such a tender song would make a baby cry, the same baby whose colicky screams were soothed by holding him over a running washing machine at 3 A.M.

I experimented. Perhaps he was crying about something else. But my experiments only showed that Hans was indeed crying about the music. Later on, when he was about 18 months old and able to talk a little, I played it again. His eyes filled with tears and he said, "Music sad. No music sad." Now he loves that music. Maybe as an infant Hans was remembering being with God. Maybe the music reminded him, arousing his tearful anhelo.

Somehow I too believe we all passed through the heart of God on our way to where we are. And memory stirs desire to be touched again. Presence remembered provokes the wound of absence. The luminous moments when we are acutely aware of God's presence make the anhelo worse, because we are reawakened to what we are sometimes missing.

And what we are missing is not only "God." "God" is another word requiring definition. The missing of God reverbertates in the missing of a loved one and in the absence of justice, truth, goodness and grace--all those things whose absence wounds the human heart. But how do we long for a fulfillment we've never known? When were we touched by perfect love, truth, justice and kindness? When were we caressed with utter comprehension? When did we first hear the music whose echo now breaks our hearts?

It must have been, as Hans says, when we were with God. And so the only way to come close to it is to live as closely as possible to God now--to try and be at one with the heartbeat of life, to love and to be true, just, kind and good--to try and nudge the mountains and valleys into an embrace that heals the breach.

There is awful irony in the Christmas celebration of the word made flesh because what are we left with? Words! Sometimes I want to brush them away in annoyance. The holy scriptures, words that come from the heart of God, arrive on this shore like letters from across the ocean. They bring a loved one near, but not nearly near enough! Why celebrate the incarnation and then go back to unsatisfying words?