Advent: Divinity is in Your DNA

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It's the second week of Advent, a dark time of preparation and watchful waiting for the coming of the Christ child on Christmas day. Advent, (from the Latin Adventus, “coming”) reminds us of another arrival, the second coming when God’s kingdom will be fulfilled on earth as it is in heaven. It is the time of year when we yearn for Emmanuel, for God to be with us. So we watch the manger or look towards the heavens and wait for Christ’s arrival, but what if we are looking in the wrong direction? 

The Second Coming of Christ (from the Greek Parousia, “presence”) has been primarily interpreted by institutional Christianity as a futuristic, literal event when Jesus will return to earth. It assumes Christ did leave us, that we are separated from God right now, awaiting an external experience to be reunited with the Divine. But like all things sacred, there is a mystical meaning which has the power to change not only how we see ourselves, but our very relationship with God. 

A closer look for Christ points us not to the clouds, but toward the inner reality of the living Christ within you, just waiting to be revealed. Paul writes in Galatians, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” He also asks, “Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” Later in Colossians, he spells it out more clearly, “And this is the secret: Christ lives in you.” Jesus says something similar. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” And later he urges, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” 

In the earliest sayings of Jesus recorded in The Gospel of Thomas we read, “Rather, the Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you. When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.” Jesus is pointing to a maxim almost as old as religion itself: “Know Thyself” and you will find salvation.  

And who are you? You are a child of God, made in the Divine image, a bearer of Christ. Divinity is in your DNA. “Being Sons of the Father is to be like Jesus himself, a status one does not attain anew but that one realizes one has always had,” writes scholar Stevan Davies. 

This Advent season, instead of waiting and watching for the outward appearance of Christ, do the necessary work to access, cultivate, and reveal Christ’s presence within you by following the self-emptying way of love. In a consumer culture replete with accumulation and narcissism, shed the false self this season by adopting the daily practice of dying to your ego, attachments, and your very earthly identity. And in so doing, you will open up the possibility for Christ to be revealed in a world desperate for rebirth. 

A Brief Meditation From Our Monastic Scholar in Residence

In a season of insatiable accumulation, of buying, spending, and consuming, have you ever considered what it might be like to lose everything, to come face to face with who you really are without all the outer attachments of your ego and possessions? If you are trapped by all you have or if you have experienced the strange gift of hitting "rock bottom," watch this brief meditation from our Monastic Scholar in Residence Father Brendan E. Williams, CMR in order to find a true sense of liberation in this season of ravenous commercialism.