Preparing for Advent

Preparing for Advent by Rev Michaël Merle on Remembrance Sunday, 24 November 2024

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

​Advent, which this year appropriately falls on 1 December, marks the beginning of the church year, the liturgical year. The year starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It marks the beginning of a new cycle of celebrating the various festivals. See again the recent article on the Michaelmas Conference in which there is a full description of the three sets of three festivals that we notice in our community: the three main festivals of the Father, the three main festivals of the Son and the three main festivals of the Spirit. We are in the transition between the last of the festivals of the Spirit God, Michaelmas, and Advent. 

Advent is a festival of beginning. It is going on an advent-ure. It is a festival of expectancy, an expectancy that carries a sense of what is coming. We can look forward with real hope for what does arrive at Christmas. Advent is the expectancy of a birth, so there is a sense of a gestation. In this case it is not connected to the number 40, but we can work with the number 4. We can carry through the four weeks of Advent the four stages of life as we know it: physical, etheric, astral and spirit-presence, the “I”-constitution. 

We could speak about the elements that we know: the Advent Wreath, the four Sundays, the steps that one can take for Christmas. But that is about being in Advent. How do we prepare for Advent – prepare for a time of preparation? Here is a way of stepping into a relationship before realising the full extent of the relationship. 

Our celebration of Advent follows the church conventions. How do we prepare for something that is so set? 

Here are three experiences in world history where a human being encounters something that they have an association with but suddenly that relationship transforms and a whole new vision appears. They embrace that vision because they realise that in it is something and they are trying to arrive at it. They are trying to work towards the full birth of something. Before they can arrive at the full birth they find themselves in a position where they can no longer influence the world around them, because they cross the threshold. Their sudden expansive vision may live on with others and sometimes it doesn’t. These three instances from history were selected because they are connected with the light of the sun as an inspiration. The reason for this is because the Advent Epistle speaks about the “chariot of the sun”. The three people of whom we are speaking heard a voice in the inner place of the soul (listen to the words of the Advent Epistle) that they heard at hand of the light and how this light manifests in the light of the sun. 

First, we will speak of a prophet who was a priest of the religion of his day. The time that he lived in is often misrepresented because other prophets came in the subsequent centuries who strongly identified with his message and even took his name, or at least, became known to history by his name, so that the dates of these later prophets have become confused with the original. We probably only have the records of the later prophets available in the archaeological record. This prophet was known as Zarathustra or Zoroastra. 

We know something of the story behind this prophet’s moment of insight. He was the priest of a religion of which we have no records. It was a religion in the part of the world between the Mediterranean and India. It had a pantheon of gods. He goes down to the river. He is fully aware of a particular constellation of gods that are important in his religion. In this constellation is a lesser god. While he is bathing in the water of the river he looks up and sees the sun. In this experience of the sun and the light of the sun, he realises that this lesser god is in reality the Great God who has been misunderstood and therefore miscast in the religion of the people into a lesser station. This God he describes as Ahura Mazda which translates as the Lord of Wisdom. He describes this God as the Lord of Light and the creator of the good in the universe. He elevates this Lord of Wisdom and in the development of a way of worship of this Being he describes Him as the God of Light. There is now a new relationship to the light that comes from the Divine. The spiritual light that rays down to the earth that is connected with the light of the sun that we experience, that is related to the light of Divinity. To Zarathustra it presents as the fullness of Divinity, whereas it has previously been seen only as an aspect of Divinity. He then recognises that juxtaposed to the Lord of Light is a Lord of Darkness. This places the human being in the battle of discerning what is Good from what is not Good. Zarathustra now begins to become his own Tree of Knowledge. Within the Zarathustran tradition there is a picture of the future: the Tree of Life. This Tree of Life is rooted in the Water of Life. (In every single Post-Atlantean Cultural Epoch there is to be found in the religious traditions a symbol of the Tree of Life. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is in the process of being achieved within humanity and thus the picture of the future is the Tree of Life.) 

This is not the only occasion in history where someone has connected to the idea of light, and as we see in the next two cases, to the light of the sun and recognising what may be described as a sun god. The association of the sun with forces of creativity, forces of light and forces of life. We can see this association and understanding of Divinity with what we can call the Christ – the Son God. 

The next person was called Amenhotep. He was Amenhotep IV after his father Amenhotep III of Egypt. Amenhotep IV was the father of Tutankhamun, and he changed his name to Akhenaten (Akhnaten). He is often considered to be one of the first monotheists. He recognised Aten as the only god from among the many gods of Egypt. Amenhotep III had named the royal barge, that sailed the Nile, the “Spirit of Aten”. Aten was considered to be an aspect of Ra, the sun god. He was the aspect that is the sun disk that rays its warmth down: 

The warmth of the sun that gently caresses the earth. Akhenaten disallowed the worship of all other gods. He built a new capital for himself, and it all faded upon his death. He understood a relationship to this sun god. (Philip Glass created an opera called Akhnaten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSn_UAquOfw)

The last is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. He was emperor of the Roman empire briefly at the age of fourteen – between 218 – 222 AD. He is better known as Elagabalus. At fourteen he was a priest and high priest of a cult to the sun god, Elagabal, although Elagabal means god of the mountain, brought into Roman Latin from Arabic. This cult stood against the primary cult at the time of Mithras. Elagabalus established the cult of Elagabal in Rome when he became emperor and described the god a Sol Invictus – the invincible sun.

​In some cases he appears with other gods:

​Here we have three occasions in history where someone has the experience: “this is what I have been looking for”. The experience of ‘here is the light that enlightens’, a true picture of what he would describe for his time as the ‘light of the world’. 

This is what Advent is about: preparing ourselves for the light of the world. What appears for us at Christmas is the child that must bear the Christ. The light of this child is born under the sign of the light of the sun. This is what a star is, it is a sun. The star represents the light-being that is descending into this child. It is descending from the heavens to connect with, to touch the earth, and to incarnate into a human being. We experience a step further than Zarathustra, Akhenaten and Elagabalus experienced. We are preparing for an event that takes us from Christmas to Golgotha. The turning point begins when the child is born, the human being that can bear the Christ, but without Golgotha the turning point is not accomplished. 

If our Advent preparation is only about remembering the birth 2000 years ago then we are merely a cult of historical remembering. Our preparation today for what Advent must be, not for the birth of a baby in a manger, but for the birth of Christ in us, in the individual and also in the community. We may, in humility, sometimes have a sense of the Christ in us, but looking into the world we may wonder at where Christ is in the community. Then the question must arise that if I do not see the Christ in the world, does the world see the Christ in me? Do I reflect the Christ for the world? It always comes back to me. 

The preparation for Advent is to spend the time in Advent focussing on Advent 2024, what is coming into being now. What is it to be in the space I am looking for the birth of this being human in the world today. We get four weeks to do this, by focussing on finding the light – connecting to the light that does enlighten us, to see in the depths of darkness. This connects us to the latter part of the Advent Epistle.