“There is a risk for any religion that looks to accomplished events as its foundation. The word once unexpectedly spoken becomes ours, is absorbed more and more into our needs and fancies and preferences. Once it was strange, now it is familiar and idolatrous. The Advent tension is a way of learning again that God is God: that between even our deepest and holiest longing and the reality of God is a gap which only grace can cross; otherwise we are alone again, incommunicado, our signals and symbols bounced back to us off the glassy walls of the universe.”
