Before beginning the National Retreat in Italy I visited the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova. It contains one of Giotto’s greatest masterpieces: a sequence of dazzling frescoes, as fresh as they were when he painted them between 1303 and 1305. Art historians call it a revolution in world art both for the new way it uses perspective and for the shift it initiated into naturalism and the expression of human feeling.
If this can be true of a great work of art, how much more can be said of the Incarnation as a revolution in how humanity sees and understands itself and how it initiates a new potential in the deep structure of human consciousness?
A small, particular detail of Giotto’s illustrations of the life of Jesus struck me deeply and remains with me as I begin Advent. It was the Nativity scene, identifiable from all its traditional elements. But in particular I was moved by the powerful energy of the mutual gaze, caught in paint and through Giotto’s creative eye, between Mary and the newborn child. Especially the intensity of the baby’s gaze into the eyes of his adoring mother. I could feel the oxytocin flowing. It is called the ‘love hormone’ because of its role in social bonding, developing trust and empathy. With this comes attachment, an inevitable initial aspect of love while also being something that has to be let go if love is to expand beyond limits.
Advent is a spiritual experience of time used nor just for our ordinary tasks and daily duties but to gaze and live deeply into the nature of the bond between the ground of Being, the Holy Trinity, and each member of the human family. We are being reborn every day. It is also a collective preparation for a truly contemplative celebration of the revolutionary and evolutionary moment that burst open in the history of humanity in the Nativity.
In the gospel for the First of the four Sundays of this season (Mt 24:37-44) Jesus calls us to stay awake because we don’t know the day in which we will be fully awakened by the gaze between humanity and God that he incarnates. Uncertainty usually disturbs us and we soon begin to build defences against it with ramparts of false security. But this kind of uncertainty is different. It is the passage from pretence to reality, from fear to an unlimited expansion of heart and mind allowing our everyday humanity to become each day more alive and to flourish through everything.
