Always Arriving

I took this picture during a late afternoon walk today as the cold setting sun off to my right was turning the lake silver.
I used an old sermon of Karl Rahner's for spiritual reading yesterday and today.  It's from a collection of his sermons, The Eternal Year, published in English in 1964, translated from the 1953 German.
He reminds me that "Advent" means an arrival.  The liturgy brings into the present the past arrival of God in our world and the arrival yet to come as well as the present arrival in sacrament and grace.  Advent celebrates an interpenetration of the past, present and future.  Jesus is always ariving in our world.
This constantly coming Jesus lives in me and enables me in faith to experience his arrival long ago and his arrival yet to come.  I don't become lost in nostalgia for Bethlehem nor in anxiety about the Final Coming.  That coming is not so much a second arrival as the perfect completion of God's own life already established in the world by the life, death and resurrection of Christ.
Rahner says, "In a mysterious way the believer becomes a contemporary of the Incarnate Son of God."  I enter into Christ's living and dying and rising.  I look to my future as an event that is happening right now as Jesus brings me to my own perfect completion.
Jesus within draws me into the eternal "now" of God.  There is not past nor future for God.  God experiences everything as now.  Both the past of my life which has become holy, and my life's eternal, boundless future draw together in the now of this world.