Week 2: Mystery

"Where the understanding is outraged, where human nature rebels, where our piety keeps a nervous distance: there, precisely there, God loves to be; there he baffles the wisdom of the wise; there he vexes our nature, our religious instincts. There he wants to be, and no one can prevent Him.
Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and grand, that he works wonders where man loses heart, that he makes splendid what is slight and lowly. Indeed, this is the wonder of wonders, that God loves the lowly.
"God has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden." God in lowliness - that is the revolutionary, the passionate word of Advent."

"From the Christian point of view, spending Christmas in a prison doesn't pose any special problem. Most likely, a more meaningful and authentic Christmas is celebrated here by many people than in places where only the name of the feast remains. Misery, pain, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt have an altogether different meaning in God's eyes than in the judgment of men. God turns toward the very places from which humans tend to turn away. Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him at the inn: A prisoner can understand all this better than other people. It's truly good news for him; in believing it, he knows he has been made a part of the Christian community that breaks down all spatial and temporal frontiers, and the walls of prison lose their meaning."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Mystery of Holy Night 

When I think about the mystery of Advent, my first inclination is towards the concept of the paradoxical nature of the coming of Christ. There was nothing grand about the situation and yet it was the perfect situation. God came where we didn't expect it, "vex[ing] our nature, our religious instincts." This is what Bonhoeffer describes from his jail cell, a place where "only the name of the feast remains." This is a place of mystery and of confusion. God is in the very places where we seem to turn away, the places that are outside of our normal boundaries.

Today, meditate on the final line of the last Bonhoeffer quote and imagine what it means to be "a part of the Christian community that breaks down all spatial and temporal frontiers."