God, The Intellect and Advent

Quite a fascinating article, by Peter Savodnik appeared in The Free Press yesterday about how many influential public intellectuals are “suddenly” finding faith.  It deserves comment on this First Sunday of Advent.

I have never been one to be overly impressed by what intellectuals think about anything, much less God and religion.  The piece opens:

In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.

“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.

I read that and it points out to me that the conversation of intellectuals is as much driven by fashion of a sort as it is genuine intellectual pursuits.  That reads more like “It’s mini skirts this year,” than it does a statement of where their thought was leading them.  “The question of God” is not a matter of fashion to be dismissed or accepted – it is fundamental.

But the real meat of the piece appears in the many stories of how intellectuals have come to faith and they all describe an experience that was beyond intellect, yet was an essential part of them.  It was not their thoughts that brought them to faith, nor was it emotion.  It was, generalizing, a sense on a deep and fundamental level that there was more to existence than the immediate.  They experienced this sensation, regardless of desire, quest, or willingness.  Shakespeare summed it up well:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Which brings me to this First Sunday in Advent.  On the church calendar we are now anticipating and awaiting a miracle – a miracle so grand that we have set aside an entire month just to build up to its celebration.  That’s a pretty big miracle.  And what is a miracle?  I would suggest that it is something not dreamt of in your philosophies.  It can be huge, such as the incarnation we now so anxiously await, or it can be small, like the simple sensation that there is…more.

And yet those miraculous extremes are not so far apart.  After all, what is the incarnation if it is not that more inserting itself into our immediate reality?  As the gospel writer John put it, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The season is upon us, and threatens to envelope us.  Let us remember this Advent season that Christmas is not about the shopping, the decorations, the parties, the concerts or any of the other immediacies that seek to overtake our lives.  It is about “the more,” and how that more came to be with us and reveal itself to us in a real and immediate way.