It would be a shame to truncate the entrance antiphon from today’s Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. What the rubrics offer is derived from Deutero-Isaiah:

Shower, O heavens, from above,
    and let the skies rain down righteousness;
let the earth open, that salvation may spring up,
    and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also;
    I the Lord have created it. (Is 48:5 NRSV)

Indeed, let the skies rain down the Just One, says the official translation of the antiphon itself. If that is what we are waiting for, then yes, let the heavens rain down—rorate caeli in Latin and hence the name of those early-morning Masses leading up to Christmas. That’s good news in advance, I don’t contest. But the good news is more than this. The antiphon further asks that the earth be opened and bring forth a Saviour. Not only is the sky above beseeched, but this fragile earth is asked to become permeable—aperiatur terra in Latin, if we’re so inclined (I’m not particularly).

God did not so love the world from an invulnerable distance. Rather, God loves vulnerably, and God loves, in fact, the kosmos (Jn 3:16). Our salvation is nigh at hand. But the “our” in question is not merely human. It is the first-person plural of the whole creation. Perhaps if the scriptures and the liturgy didn’t teach me this, I would never believe it. But they do. This is the opening of the responsorial psalm from today’s Mass:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
    the world, and those who live in it,
for he has founded it on the seas
    and established it on the rivers. (Ps 24:1–2 NRSV)

And this forms the specific context for the refrain in the biblical text:

Lift up your heads, O gates!
    and be lifted up, O ancient doors,
    that the King of glory may come in! (Ps 24: 7, 9  NRSV)

Or, even more simply and less prone to doubt, in the liturgical refrain: “Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.”

Are we not back here again at the aperiatur terra? Is it not true that we call rorate caeli and then aperiatur terra? Would there not be something distorted and incomplete in being satisfied with half this spirituality of anticipation and hope?

If the earth were not asked to open, it would be hard for us to see God’s mode of loving as vulnerable. The divinity would remain more at a distance. It would seem, as much as the notion is self-contradictory, that God loves invulnerably.

But the earth does open. Second Isaiah tells me; the Church tells me. Our human flesh is made from the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7). Blessedness lies in walking such that the earth is associable to and inheritable by us (Mt 5:5). Jesus, in becoming more fully human than anyone else, becomes more—not less—earthy, and he becomes more—not less—completely vulnerable. He walked that blessed way. He was in a deep and immediate contact with things. He, so to speak, touched grass with an intimacy that lies beyond our comprehension.

As for us sinners with somewhat dulled natures, we would not have even contemplation without our earthiness. Contemplation—however high-fallutin’ it sounds when we imagine it in terms of seeing—is only a focused gaze, absorptive of both the mind and heart, because it is rooted all the way in our most primordial external sense of touch and internal sense of memory. It is only possible to the whole human person if we implicate our entire, earthy, humus-like nature. As Pope Francis would have said, touch is the most religious sense. And that entails a substantial vulnerability, both to the world and to the indwelling Lord. After all, is not Christian contemplation a certain experiential passivity to the divine states? Without such vulnerability and its phenomenologically tactile substratum, there could never be a contemplative gaze. Nor would there be salvation. All there would be is ideas.

In these final days of Advent, my heart turns not just to heaven—though it does turn there, too—but even to the earth. It inclines towards the whole community of creatures held (notice the gritty, tactile phenomenology) in the Father’s hand. It rests a gaze on the integral vulnerability of the Saviour. As the Church teaches us this day, may the earth open. May salvation may spring up, and may the watered earth cause righteousness to sprout up also.