In preparation for Christmas, I tell the Advent story to our preschool and parish children. It is the story of the king who is coming, but the king who is coming is not the kind of king the people were expecting. This king has no castle, no army, no riches. This king was a baby born in a barn. The king who was coming is still coming. That is the mystery of Christmas. During Advent, we have to get ready to enter into this mystery.
Celebrating the birth of Jesus is not only about a past event, but also about a present reality. The Christ who was born in Bethlehem is still being born. This is why the Church speaks of Christ’s first and second coming. The first coming was a singular and final event. The second coming is a collective and evolutionary process.
“Here, in time,” wrote the 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart, “we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’”[i]
The mystery of Christmas is that the Christ who was born of Mary is also being born in us. The king who was coming is still coming. The Church speaks of this as the process of divinization: God became human so that human beings may become divine; so that we may participate in the divine energies and perceive the world from a God’s-eye perspective, with wisdom and compassion.
What began in Jesus is now part and parcel of the evolutionary development of human consciousness. We are becoming fully human. That, at least, is our hope. But what does this evolutionary leap look like? What is being born in us today?
For the last 25 years of his life, Fr. Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk well known for his teaching of the practice of Centering Prayer, hosted the annual Snowmass Conference at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado. This Conference was a small invitational gathering of contemplatives from a number of spiritual traditions (Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Indigenous), with a simple agenda of meditating together and sharing conversation from the heart. You might think of it as a collaborative laboratory for the exploration of the next phase of human spiritual evolution.
What emerged from this inter-spiritual dialogue was a set of eight principles upon which the contemplative streams of the religious traditions could agree.
1. The world’s religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.
2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite possibility and actualization.
4. Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.
5. The potential for human wholeness – or, in other frames of reference: enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness – is present in every human being.
6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also through nature, art, human relationships and service to others.
7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.
8. Disciplined spiritual practice is essential to spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s own efforts but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.[ii]
What the contemplatives on the cutting edges of our religious traditions discovered is that each lineage contains all the levels of spiritual development, and that humankind is evolving toward a unitive consciousness; what Christians would call Christ consciousness. As Keating would write late in his life, “The ultimate consciousness is the total Oneness in which God is all in all.”[iii]
This consciousness shaped how Keating interpreted his own Christian practice, which he continued to embrace even as he recognized the shared end toward which all the religious traditions are evolving. Writing to his friend Isabel Castellanos in 2016, he affirmed,
“You know that Christ is the center of my life. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving the body of Christ. But I believe that all of humanity is the body of Christ. Therefore, when I receive the Eucharist, it is not just the union between two persons (myself and Christ) but a union with all of creation, which is the body of Christ. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving in me all of creation.”[iv]
Keating died in 2018 at the age of 95. Two weeks before his physical death, on October 12, 2018, he emerged briefly from four days in what appeared to be a deep coma, and proceeded to deliver a final oracle in which he called humanity to take responsibility for its collective evolutionary development for the sake of the future of the world, and to recognize the Oneness that is the nature of all the great religious traditions.[v]
The king who was coming is still coming. We all have the potential for Christ to be born in us, to advance the evolution of our species in a spiritually adaptive way. The contemplative cutting edge of the Snowmass Conferences represent the 1-2% of the human population who are innovators in the cultural evolution need for our planet. Social science indicates that when innovators influence early adopters (approximately 16-20% of the population) to embrace adaptive change, the diffusion of innovation is hard to stop.[vi]
We stand in an evolutionary moment in which we are poised for the spiritual innovators to shift the consciousness of the early adopters. This is the conversion for which we must witness and pray. Christ is still being born. And the question that we must ask ourselves, is that same one that St. Augustine pondered, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.”
[i] Meister Eckhart, Dum Medium Silentium, Sermon on Wisdom 18:14. See The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed., Maurice O’C. Walshe (Crossroad: 2009), 29.
[ii] Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic (Boulder, CO: Shambala Publications, Inc., 2024), p. 195-196.
[iii] Ibid., p. 198.
[iv] Ibid, p. 200.
[v] Ibid., p. 205-206.
[vi] Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era (St. Paul, MN: Church Innovations Institute, 2006), p. 55-56.