God Immanent in Man - Paragraph 2
Advent, Solstice, and Being Accessed
Advent and the winter solstice arrive quietly each year, asking less of us than we expect. These seasons do not demand clarity or productivity, but simply invite us to notice the darkening days and the way life itself slows. Something in me recognizes this rhythm. It feels like permission to stop reaching outward and attend to what is already moving beneath the surface.
These shortened days beckon us, if we allow it, toward the quiet beauty of hibernation. We live in a world shaped by constant availability, yet the natural world is doing something altogether different. It is resting. Gathering itself. Preparing for what will come. Advent and solstice seem to share this same wisdom: a call to slow down, to notice, to consent to what is quietly unfolding. With that posture, let’s turn to Roberts.
“Like every revelation, ‘that’ which is revealed admits of no mental image, does not speak or identify itself. Although we intuitively know God—indeed, what else has access to the core of our being, our life, our existence? At the same time, however, ‘that’ which is revealed may not be in accord with what we had ever heard or learned about ‘God.’ Like every revelation, ‘that’ which is revealed does not match our previous ideas and concepts, much less any image (including those from the Bible) we may have formed of God.”
Today I am caught by Roberts’s question: “What else has access to the core of our being?” When I first read it I felt resistance rise because obviously not everyone would say they intuitively know God. I wondered how I could honestly hold that tension. But the longer I stayed with her words, the more her logic opened something in me.
Indeed, what does have access to the core of my being? What else gives me life? I am fairly certain I do not exist myself. I did not wake this morning and decide, Today I will exist. Existence simply happened to me. Something else is always already at work.
And yet, what accesses me is not simply me. The longer I practice awareness and presence, the more I realize how little I actually know myself. I don’t even know the half of it. What is this that allows the deep, unconscious parts of me to surface so insistently, and at times, so mercifully? Left to my own devices, I doubt I would choose to uncover many of these unconscious places and it is astonishing what manner of darkness lives in me.
I notice this dark unconsciousness in small, unassuming moments. For instance, sitting in silence one morning, I became aware of a tightening in my chest, subtle, but unmistakable. A wave of sadness followed, without a clear story attached. My instinct was to shift, to distract myself, to move on. Instead, I stayed. And in staying, I sensed that this encounter was not about fixing or resolving anything, but about being met exactly where I was.
What surprises me is “that” which accesses me does not seem troubled by what it finds. In fact, it appears to meet me precisely there in the messy, chaotic humanity that I am. The place of this meeting is a collision, the meeting ground with the imageless “that” that often feels like a place I would rather avoid.
Roberts is clear that what accesses us does not come in image form. It is difficult to say what it is, except that it carries the unmistakable flavor of love or lightness. St. John of the Cross and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing both describe this encounter as a kind of walking in the dark, which feels apt. You cannot see how it is happening. There is nothing your mind can grasp or hold onto. And yet, you know that somehow you are being accessed. And you sense that it is for your becoming, not your diminishment.
Increasingly, I recognize that this accessing happens not only in insight or thought, but in the body. It arrives as sensation before understanding, a softening of breath, a heaviness behind the eyes, an unexpected ache or warmth. The body seems to know before the mind can catch up. Paying attention here has become part of my practice: staying with sensation long enough to let it speak, without rushing to explain it away.
One place I see this clearly is in my work with the Enneagram. As a Nine, learning about my fixated patterns has been deeply helpful. It gives language and structure to what otherwise remains vague. But when “that” which accesses me reveals what I am actually up to, the conceptual Enneagram often feels two-dimensional by comparison. The map matters, but it cannot substitute for the lived encounter. Experiencing the pattern in real time, feeling it arise in my body, noticing the impulse to numb or disappear, is a very different kind of knowing. Utterly different than understanding the material intellectually.
And this is only one way accessing occurs. There are other moments, quiet and unannounced, where something of Love or Reality is disclosed. Afterward, I simply know that something has shifted. I now know something that I did not know before, even if I cannot explain it.
I am also drawn to Roberts’s insistence that God has no image, not even biblical ones. I don’t know why we the Church has struggled so with this idea. Mary did not expect God to arrive through an angel and a pregnancy. Moses did not anticipate a burning bush proclaiming “I AM.” These were utterly personal, unrepeatable encounters. Why, then, does the Church insist on packaging God into an image we can agree upon?
What Roberts asks of me feels aligned with what Advent and the solstice invite: a willingness to slow down and notice what is actually happening in my experience. To watch closely what surrender and letting go produce. To place myself, as best I can, in a posture receptive to revelation as revelation cannot be imagined, only received.
Perhaps this season is offering you a similar invitation, not to figure anything out, but to notice where you are being accessed beneath images, words, and explanations. You might begin simply by slowing down enough to sense what is already present. Nothing more is required. Paying attention is enough for now.
