Invitation to an Audacious Advent

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and I invite you to celebrate an audacious Advent with me.

One of the most audacious Advent poems I know comes from Saint Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022). Saint Symeon risked security and reputation to share his truths with us. Like all the great mystics, he dared to trust his experience of God and claimed such experience was possible for all Christians. Like many great mystics he was exiled. Saint Symeon didn't just believe in God's incarnation, he experienced it, in his very cells, and he wrote about it, insisting that this could be our experience, too.

I honor his insistence, for I have experienced the same thing, and I, too, help others discover this truth. I refer to the type of spiritual direction I offer as somatically-based spiritual direction. The individuals with whom I work are accustomed to my frequent question, "Where do you feel that in your body?" I teach directees how to honor the body as a sacred text, inherently good and full of healing wisdom, even, and especially through its pain and discomfort. I invite them to turn toward whatever sensation is present in the body, trusting that whatever is present has come into view in service of their ultimate healing.

For many, this is a radically new approach, and their pilgrimage into their own bodies is made, like all pilgrimages, step by step. And, like all pilgrimages, this journey is unpredictable and may be approached by both anticipation and some anxiety, eagerness, but also resistance. We welcome it all.

Because these perspectives and practices have been so life expanding for me personally, and those whom I serve, I am so eager to share more of this with you.

For now, on this first Sunday of Advent, I invite you to simply consider Saint Symeon's audacious claims regarding Christ's body and your own. You may read the poem below, or might you let me read it to you? I experienced so much delight creating this meditative recording of the poem just for you.

Christ's Body

We awaken in Christ's body,
as Christ awakens our bodies.
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ,
becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
—Then open your heart to him.
And let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ's body
where all our body all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light.
We awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.



I'm excited in the coming weeks to expand on some of these radically Christian perspectives and to offer you some practices to deepen your consciousness of Christ's body alive in your own. In doing so, we will learn how to welcome and wait with what is dark, discomforting, or even painful, in our very own cells and to find, as my friend Gayle Boss writes in All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings, "The dark is not an end, but a door. This is the way a new beginning comes."

Soul friends, the darkness is so evident, but aren't you longing to discover the way to new beginnings? Please join me in celebrating an audacious Advent.