Secrets Buried in Platitudes

Peter Edman

An Advent reflection.

Preparing recently for Advent and Christmas, I was thinking about how much I enjoy running across a good quotation. It’s always gratifying to find someone who can express themselves in a pithy or memorable manner, particularly if they can in the process help us look at the world in a fresh way. Four quotations from the past year stood out for me particularly.

One is from an interview the novelist Walker Percy did toward the end of his life, collected in the book Signposts in a Strange Land. He was asked the secret of the success of his marriage. His answer helps us see something about the world:

There is no secret. Or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family.

In the case of marriage, I expect Percy was saying something about the necessity, if a marriage is to endure, of the grace and hard work of a committed love for another person. These former commonplaces are now treated as a secret (or a scandal) in a free-love-at-first-sight culture. But that’s a topic for another time.

What Percy is also reminding us of is the concept of the open secret, something so patently obvious that we overlook it. And this is a part of what Advent is about. We come to know our stories so well that they become platitudes. But buried in the platitudes about mangers and shepherds and wise men and babies and stars and presents and camels and greetings and holly . . . is a pretty big secret.

In this case, not only is the secret so obvious that we tend to overlook it, the platitudes are actually a help—a means of approaching something so inconceivable, so truly scandalous, that it is hard to get our minds around it. This is a pattern we find repeatedly in accounts of Jesus across the centuries. The intellectual Simone Weil recorded in a journal entry called the “Prologue” an inexplicable (if tellingly ironic) encounter she once had with Jesus. He told her, “Come with me and I will teach you things which you do not suspect.”

The story of Advent, Christmas, and beyond is, in reality, about a total upheaval of the way the world is run. When you really look at the stories, you begin to see that they are talking about a change in the physics and chemistry of the universe. A new creation. Another kingdom—another universe, another reality, another time—is breaking in. It won’t be like anything you expect or can imagine.

You begin to see, on reflection, why the Old Testament prophets and John’s Revelation start to use some extravagant metaphors, because language itself breaks down in the face of something this weird. Think too about all the different metaphors and parables Jesus uses to explain the Kingdom of Heaven. Dorothy L. Sayers, in a 1954 lecture on the limitations of language, gives a brilliant summary of them:

“The Kingdom of Heaven,” said the Lord Christ, “is among you.” But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, “Lo, here!” or “Lo, there!” You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and re-learning everything from the start. It is secret, living power—like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there—like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet—gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust, where it is just it is clearly not equal—as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the laborers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice—like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King’s Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded that the multitude sometimes failed to understand.

I love that last line.

That’s why we start with the stories. Stories can help us keep the open secret in our brains long enough for its meaning to start to get through. The familiar stories hold the secret for us until, finally, occasionally, we make a connection or catch a glimmer of something down deeper.

And this sometimes begins a process by which we can recognize our own preconceptions, our own limitations, and start trying to approach the open secret on its own terms. Simone Weil, in Waiting for God—excerpted, like the quote above, in our recent Reading—expresses it nicely:

That made me see intellectual honesty in a new light. Till then I had only thought of it as opposed to faith; your words made me think that perhaps, without my knowing it, there were in me obstacles to the faith, impure obstacles, such as prejudices, habits. I felt that after having said to myself for so many years simply: “Perhaps all that is not true,” I ought, without ceasing to say it—I still take care to say it very often now—to join it to the opposite formula, namely: “Perhaps all that is true,” and to make them alternate.

So we start small. With a baby. And he was—no question—a real baby. (Senior Fellow Dan Russ has a new book out called Flesh-and-Blood Jesus. We have just posted his chapter on the Incarnation, titled “Manger-Wetter.”) This baby sets the DNA, the pattern, the trajectory, for the new reality that is breaking in. We should pay attention.

But the baby is just the start. Advent is also the season where we remember, formally, that Jesus is coming again. It won’t be like what you’re expecting. But it has something to do with love.  

Peter L. Edman is director of research for the Trinity Forum.

Fodder, Being Human, Faiths and Worldviews, Mon 15 Dec 2008