Advent is a time of remembering, and it is a time of birthing. The season of Advent is a time each year when we pause to listen and to remember the sacred beckonings of our shared history, our shared spiritual heritage and ancestry. It is a time of listening for the hidden hum of grace and mercy in our lives. It is a time to engage our spiritual imaginations, and to recall the practices of our lives: How have they shaped us this year? How will they shape us next year?
In A Hidden Hum, award-winning author Josh R. Ritter presents another re-imagining of familiar Christian concepts, themes, and narratives. As he does in Following the Way of Wisdom Jesus and in These Dry Bones, Ritter casts a spiritual and rhetorical vision that is deeply transformative both theologically and in terms of spiritual practice for those with hearts and minds open to a radical message of love, compassion, and unconditional acceptance. Offering both formal and more informal - sometimes poetic - writing styles within his reflections, Ritter presents Advent not only as a liturgical season and as a historical event, but as an ongoing Christian practice of growth and transformation. He invites his readers to practice Advent and to engage their spiritual imaginations as they delve into the depths of what it might truly mean to practice trust, surrender, meekness, and resurrection on a daily basis.
Through the lens of the spiritual imagination, he explores, re-imagines, and reframes various ways to approach Advent, such as when he invites us to consider Mary, not Jesus, as the central figure of the Advent and Christmas stories. It is Mary, says Ritter, who is the archetypal model for Christians to follow during the Advent season because she is the one who first shows us how to birth our Christ-nature into the world. This is the season, says Ritter, of shadow and light as we remember to hold our Christ-nature gently within our spiritual womb that we call our heart. Just as Mary teaches us to do, we nurture our spiritual womb in shadow, and we prepare for the birthing of light into our lives.
The light, however, is only part of the story of Advent. Oftentimes, we tend to focus too much on the light without acknowledging that there is no light without shadow or darkness. The work for us to do during this season, suggests Ritter, is to birth light and also darkness - both as equally glorious - for we do not have one without the other. They are not a dualism. They do not blend into oneness, and they do not resist each others' difference. They unify within difference. They exist within a contradictory harmony - a movement of discord and resonance.
Recently, says Ritter, scientists discovered a gravitational-wave vibrating behind and within all of reality - a hidden hum in every atom within every human being and every animate and inanimate thing across the entire Cosmos. Advent is the story of the birth of this hidden hum, the Christ, the Logos, a hum of grace and a divine rhythm found within all things that is incarnated across the Cosmos and within all of Creation.
