Thinking Anew: Our anywhere and everywhere God

As an Irish person of whatever generation it is that I am, I am someone who can feel fairly at home anywhere in the world. I know that I could happily settle in any number of places, if circumstances required. I am reminded of David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, in which he identifies two different kinds of people – “Anywheres”, who have “achieved” identities arising from their careers and education, and “Somewheres”, who get their identity from a sense of place and attachment to a group. These two tribes continue to be disastrously pitted against each other in our political discourse and in our social media bubbles. Yet in truth, we are called to deeply honour each other.

I conducted a funeral recently of a woman who was 98. She had lived a quiet, old-fashioned life: born between the two world wars, spending her whole life within a few square miles in the city, apart from when she was evacuated during the second World War. She had no children. She never married. She lived with and looked after her parents until they died, first her dad, then her mum. It moves me to remember how God’s favourite people are those without power or status or influence. These are the people who he primarily chose and used and blessed and concerned himself with. In my parish work, I am connected to many who have deep, deep roots in the place where they live and have always lived.

I think of St Benedict’s Rule of Stability, in which a monk or nun entering a monastic community commits to remaining in the same Abbey for the rest of their life. Some 700 years later, St Francis committed himself to the other extreme: being itinerant, remaining rootless, owning nothing, serving God on the highways and byways. Both callings have their special anointings, gifts and temptations.

At Christmas we celebrate our “Anywhere” God becoming a “Somewhere” person. The omnipresent omnipotent God chose to enter history: to be born into a particular family within a particular tribe in a particular land. In the formation of the Jewish people and in the incarnation the universal became specific, and this changed our sense of history itself. In Buechner’s words: “The biblical view is that history is not an absurdity to be endured or an illusion to be dispelled or an endlessly repeating cycle to be escaped. Instead, it is for each of us a series of crucial, precious, and unrepeatable moments that are seeking to lead us somewhere.”

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For now we are deep in Advent, that season ‘perfectly balanced between hope and despair’, waiting for salvation to come

This is the power and beauty of living the liturgy. Every liturgical season is specific to a particular time of the year but has daily application in our lives. Whenever there is war raging, wherever humans are slaughtering other humans, it is Good Friday, although liturgically we are called to sit with this terrible reality in particular during Holy Week. Easter, when we celebrate the victory of life over death in the resurrection of Christ, is the wellspring and the foundation for our daily Christian journeys, yet we celebrate this in particular every spring.

[ Thinking Anew: Growing old is a process and so too is wisdom and belief in God ]

[ Thinking Anew: Into each life some rain must fall ]

But for now we are deep in Advent, that season “perfectly balanced between hope and despair”, waiting for salvation to come. Waiting is an art that is not encouraged in our culture, and there are many different contexts to our waiting. We may be waiting in excitement for something we are certain is coming, like the spring. We may be waiting in dread for something we know is coming, like chemotherapy. We may be waiting in hope for something which may or may not materialise, like a longed-for pregnancy, or in fear for something that may or may not come to be, like a war. How we wait matters. Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “Our waiting is not nothing. It is something – a very big something – because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.”

As people of faith we have tasted the goodness of God, and this informs our waiting. The Christ-child arrived, in real time. Let us celebrate!