On Coming and Becoming in Advent

Barbara Anne Kozee

Today’s reflection is from guest contributor Barbara Anne Kozee, a doctoral candidate in theological ethics at Boston College. Her current research focuses on social trust and polarization in the Church and politics.

In Fr. Karl Rahner’s prayer, “God who is to come,” the great German theologian reflects on the Advent paradox of entering into a time of liturgical waiting for a God who has, in some sense, already come:

“Every year Your Church celebrates the holy season of Advent, my God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise… And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, You have already come and pitched Your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite You to anything more than this with our “Come?” Could You approach any nearer to us than You did when You became the “Son of Man,” when You adopted our ordinary little ways so thoroughly that it’s almost hard for us to distinguish You from the rest of our fellow men?”

Toward the end of this prayer, Rahner  comes to a spiritual insight on God’s perpetual coming:

“Slowly a light is beginning to dawn. I’m beginning to understand something I have known for a long time: You are still in the process of Your coming. Your appearance in the form of a slave was only the beginning of Your coming… Actually You haven’t come—You’re still coming… Behold, You come. And Your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of Your Advent.”

This Advent, we might think about Rahner’s prayer and Christ’s becoming on Christmas as resonant with the way that queer theorists have considered “coming out” to be more than one single historical moment of visibility, but rather a lifelong process of self-discovery that comes in bits and pieces. There is a spiritual and contemplative dimension to this idea of finding ourselves in our queerness and “chasing the horizon.”

The queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes:

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”

Muñoz’s claim is that queer time is not too far off from the Christian understanding of salvation. While we may be able to experience some sense of God’s presence and knowing of ourselves as beloved, there will always be a sense of mystery and of the not-yet in this worldly time. Similarly, as queer people, we might lean into the idea that our queer identities are constantly in a state of taking shape, and even find joy in the fact that we may spend our whole lives searching for our queer selves, and never fully succeed!

In this way, queer processes of becoming, coming out of the closet, or formation of queer identity are a part of this Advent paradox—of patience for divine coming, which is neither past nor future, but the present. Christ is our example of a savior in a perpetual process of coming, a living rather than historical Advent.

Somehow, the more we find God, the more we live into queerness, the more we encounter the deep ground of mystery. Advent, and this time of anticipation, becomes the warm illumination of the joyous queer horizon.

—Barbara Anne Kozee, December 20, 2024