Advent begins with a question that goes far beyond religious boundaries. It’s about how love comes without power, possession, or control. The four Sundays of Advent prepare for the Incarnation. The Incarnation, the claim that God became fully human in Jesus Christ, is at the heart of the long-debated and often misunderstood Christian story. It is a season of waiting, a moment when the world seems to be holding its breath.
Jesus is not “God” in any shallow or simple sense. Christians have been debating this since the beginning. What this tradition claims is that in Jesus the life of God is fully revealed in human life, often for bad and sometimes for good. As Carol says, “It is midnight Nothing human is to be undone or avoided, but rather to be incorporated, transformed, and drawn towards what is meant to be.
Love never jumps beyond our limits. It lives in them and they grow.
The Incarnation does not introduce something new, but makes visible what has always been there: salvation as a progressive articulation of love.
In this sense, love is not initially a feeling or an accomplishment, but the very life force of life itself, already at work before we are aware of it. God’s love is neither exclusive nor coercive. It rejoices in the reality of others rather than erasing differences or forcing similarities. Desire what you love without seizing it, give without diminishing it. The Incarnation is therefore not an interruption of the world’s story, but its disclosure, the revelation of the love that sustains creation by allowing for unbroken access and uncontrolled communion.
Advent encourages a different way of thinking about love. In other words, it is not love that is divided into parts, but a single movement that brings these together: self-giving here, desire there, friendship elsewhere. It approaches without losing its sense of distance. Seek out the interests of the other party without trying to secure it in advance. We rejoice in its presence without thinking that we own it when we are near it.
Advent leads us to patience rather than control. Love is not something that can be definitely declared or reached by force. It only seeks freedom, surprise, and room for change. Waiting in this way does not mean being passive, it means being attentive, which means being ready to accept what you didn’t plan for. Withholding love does not make you weaker. It is truer because it allows us to let what we love remain in others.
In contrast, our own efforts at love feel familiar and complex. For centuries, marriage has functioned primarily as a means of survival: protecting property, continuing the family line, and meeting society’s expectations. Love and affection may follow, but personal compatibility is less important. Romance was welcome but not required.
Today, love is often framed as finding someone who meets our requirements. It becomes something we manage, not something we grow with. Religious as well as social critics argue that an emphasis on choice and control transforms relationships into fungible goods that can be optimized and replaced.
Dating apps reinforce this logic, packaging and consuming the most human of experiences. In a culture devoted to hacks, routines, and self-improvement, even Jesus is sold. Today it’s a personalized hologram, tomorrow it could be a pocket edition.
Cultural critic Byung-chul Han describes our condition as a “hell of the same”, where any difference reproduces what we already know. We follow the rules of non-conformity. By default, novelty takes priority. Failure is not an option.
So much for friendship.
Han suggests that partnerships require a certain kind of failure, a resistance to mastery. The problem is not that we want to own others, but that we want to understand them completely in familiar terms, so that nothing remains strange or recalcitrant. If that were possible, they would no longer be strangers, but versions of ourselves.
Mystics have long resisted this impulse. Meister Eckhart claimed that “God is greater than God.” This means that what we manage to grasp is already too small. Rilke described love as “two solitudes that protect each other, touch each other, and greet each other.” They both understood that intimacy requires space to breathe.
Intimacy thrives in paradox. Both proximity and distance are needed. This tension runs through many love stories. The relationship between Anna Karenina and Vronsky promises a perfect union, but the intensity that draws them together also drives them apart. When love tries to erase boundaries, it ends up consuming itself.
Advent offers another possibility. When love approaches, it does so by force. It does not depend on guarantees or control, but on our readiness to accept what is coming without changing its shape to suit our expectations. Closeness and distance are not opposites to be overcome, but gifts to be held together.
What follows is within the same threshold. This music, heard late in Advent, inhabits the space between waiting and arriving. [*] 3:35
This is the joy of love that comes very You can approach it without being overwhelmed. Doing so changes the way we learn to love others.
[*] JS Bach: Little Fugue in G minor, BWV 578. Paul Jacobs, organ. Hazel Light Organ, Christ Cathedral, Garden Grove, California. Recorded with some of the world’s largest instruments (approximately 300 ranks and over 17,000 pipes), Jacobs captures the Advent character of the fugue. Built with patient intensity, it reveals joy like light in the shadows. It is the strength that holds complexity without requiring force. reference. peter williams JS Bach’s organ music (2003).
Close-up of the organ, organist, and pedal work. If the embedded link (triple click) does not play, Open YouTube here.
notes and reading
The four Sundays of Advent are traditionally associated with hope, peace, and joy (Gaudete), and love each.
“In the darkness of our lives, there is not one place for beauty; there is a whole place for beauty.” —René Charle, Hypnos leaf (Fie dihypnos), fille 237, in Mayhem and Mystery and other works (2011); paraphrased. Char (1907-1988) was one of France’s most respected 20th century poets, highly acclaimed by Martin Heidegger and other luminaries.
Denis de Rougemont—love in the western world (1940, 1983). An original investigation that argues that Western romance is historically rooted in heresy and inherently antithetical to the stability of everyday life. Declaration of Love: Essays on the Myth of Love (1963). A sister edition that shifts focus to the “crisis of modern marriages” and offers a more constructive vision of how love survives the myths that threaten it.
Byung-chul Han — Transparency Association (2015). Han denounced transparency as a false ideal, The most powerful and most pernicious of our modern myths. Han is a Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany.
David Bentley Hart—Infinite Beauty: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003), esp. chs. 3-4. The heart opposes the division of love into competing forms (agape, eros, philia). Divine love, he argues, is a single movement that desires, gives, and rejoices in the irreducible otherness of the beloved, drawing creation into communion.and participate in God’s own life— without coercion or possession.
Stephen A. Mitchell – Can Love Last? The Fate of a Timeless Romance (2002). A modern classic of psychoanalytic theory that challenges the assumption that passion should fade with habituation. reference. Esther Perel – Mating in Captivity: Unleashing the Erotic Intelligence (2007). A controversial bestseller that examines how modern ideals of intimacy and equality complicate sexual desire.
another joy
peace in conflict
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
