after our bodies die. Rather, fear of death is a matter of the mind. It has everything to do with how we perceive and interpret our experience. Our self-consciousness generates anxieties that make us vulnerable to manipulation and coercion in every sphere of our lives, from the most trivial preoccupation with fashion to the fate of our planet. It conspires with the exploitation of fear and uncertainty that makes us complicit in inflicting physical or spiritual death on ourselves or others. Our fretful search for certainty becomes a search for numb complacency.
But faith challenges this complacency. Faith is not about suspending critique, but about exercising it as it issues from a silent space of love, a reality yet unseen (Heb 11:1). Faith is about finding security in insecurity, the realization that unless we work hard to maintain a hole in the heavens6 by which the closed universe of anxiety is breached, the fate of everything in our created world will be determined by the human fear of “death.”
The Christian antidote to the fear of death is summed up in Philippians 2:5–11, often known as the kenotic hymn. Paul’s preface is succinct: our problems originate in our anxieties. Their resolution, says Paul, is to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . .” (v. 5, my emphasis).
Christ takes on the burden of our human self-consciousness but is never trapped by its anxieties. He never loses the clarity of his gaze on the Father, the secret exchange of love in faith. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament gather this gaze and all that it implies into the single word behold. Sadly, this word has vanished from modern translations of the Bible and the liturgy, and with it has vanished the most important message that Christianity or any other religion has to offer.
Behold is the marker word throughout the Bible. It signals shifting perspective, the holding together or even the conflating of radically different points of view. It indicates the moment when the language of belief is silenced by the exaltation of faith as these paradoxical perspectives are brought together and generate, as it were, an explosion of silence and light. This silence holds us in thrall, in complete self-forgetfulness. Our settled accounting of ordinary matters is shattered and falls into nothing as light breaks upon us. Beholding is not confined to monastic cells: it is the wellspring of ordinary life transfigured.
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Enough for him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day.
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay:
Enough for Him whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Julian of Norwich understands the importance of the word behold. Her Revelation of Divine Love is an explication of this single word. Behold is profoundly theological. It describes a reciprocal holding in being, the humility of God sharing the divine nature with what it creates. God, the creator of all, God who is beyond being, in humility allows us, created beings, to hold God in being in space and time, even as God is sustaining us in existence and holding us in eternity.
Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes tο us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.
There is something else, too, in this beholding: the great commandment tells us this seamless love applies as much to our neighbor as to God. Beholding makes it possible to live out the great commandment. It invites us to abandon our very limited perspectives and ideas, so that many aspects of life in community become not so much less difficult as irrelevant, to the point of not being noticed.
This living beneath the level of personality unfolds without denying or wasting any of the richness of the human person; it brings us, in our entirety, warts and all, to fullness. To behold God in everything is the antidote tο frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us: we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold.
It might be helpful to realize we are already in that stillness by virtue of the divine indwelling; it is thoughts and distractions that drag us away from it. This stillness is the very stillness of the heart of God, which resides in the realm of beholding in itself. We bring everything to it, and we draw everything from it. As we come to the manger, high and low, rich and poor, each brings a gift. Gospel accounts and legends tell us of a multitude of gifts, but there is one we share in common, without exception, which each of us bears to the radiant child, and that is suffering—the devastated suffering of those shattered by war; the sorrowful suffering of those who mourn; the anguished suffering of the abused; the hungry suffering of the poor; the hollow suffering of the rich; the interior suffering that is the simple longing that burns for God.
Behold! He is coming with the clouds and everyone shall see him. Behold! The Lamb of God. Behold! The hour comes. Behold! I bring you good tidings. Behold! The Lion of Judah. Behold! I am laying in Zion a foundation stone. Behold! I am sending a messenger. Behold! The bridegroom comes. Behold! I show you a mystery. Behold! The tabernacle of God is within you.
Behold! You shall conceive. It is in the beholding itself that Mary conceives, and we also. It is in this self-forgetful beholding, this eternity of love gazing on Love, of Love holding love in being, that all salvation history occurs. The words in the sentence that come after behold in the angel’s announcement are for those who do not behold, who are still chained by the imperious noise of those who wield power and control by means of the fear of death. The Word yearns with the promises of God, if only we will turn and behold and, in that beholding, be healed.
Behold: behold, and all the rest will be added unto you. “Behold!” says the angel. It is in the consent to behold, the fiat, that our fear is transmuted into love.
The beholdings that irrupt as annunciations are profoundly dislocating events, whether to the shepherds, to Mary, to Isaiah, or to us. They are sudden; they take us by surprise, often in the least likely circumstances. When we realize something beyond our knowing has happened, we may be at first incredulous, or even embarrassed. But when we finally realize we can no longer dismiss the evidence—the traces left from an encounter hidden even from ourselves—we are filled with awe.
Annunciations leave us with a sense of strangeness, for we cannot wrap our minds around what has happened. They cannot be circumscribed by concept or by the self-reflexive interpretation we call experience. They are too wonderful, they are beyond what we can ask or imagine, and in their wake life will never again be the same. Yet by welcoming this homely strangeness of God in beholding, we learn to welcome the strangeness of our neighbor, and, indeed, the strangeness of ourselves.
If we embrace these annunciations—and we ignore them at our peril—we come finally to dread, tο a forced choice: to remain in a state of alienation, to seek anesthesia, or tο plunge deeper into faith, into unknowing, relinquishing every preconception, every idea, image, and notion we have, including those about God and about ourselves, so that these annunciations may change and integrate us.
God, and the fathomless vision God longs to give, will never fail. It requires only the opening of our hearts for God to purify with the
