Honoring Advent has been a lovely, warm way to prepare for Christmas in our home. I find that there are some years--and some times of life (being a student one of them)--where it is harder to prepare yourself emotionally and spiritually for Christmas. What I like about the Advent tradition is that it allows for reflection and time to slow down in a time of year filled with busy-ness (and business). It allows for a time to critically think about your relationships with God, others, and yourself.
This year, celebrating Advent has been a way for me to turn my thoughts to Christ, and to think about the ways He brings hope, peace, joy, love, and light into this world. It has also helped me think more critically about the definitions of hope, peace, joy, and love, and to come to terms more with the ways hope and despair; peace and discord; joy and distress; and love and indifference are tied together. It has helped me have more courage to confront darkness with resolve, while believing that the light will come.
Advent is about the waiting. We are all waiting for something. And waiting is hard. That waiting and longing for peace, for healing, for things to resolve themselves, for justice . . . it is hard. Advent acknowledges that we are all waiting, but it also asks us to think about what waiting looks like. How do we wait? Advent is about longing, certainly. It is about the longing for a better world. But it is about working for that better world. It is also about coming to the joint realization that there is only so much your hands and heart can do, but at the same time, the only hands and hearts God has ever had to work with are hands and hearts like ours.
How do we wait? It is about recognizing the opposition in all things. Advent is about loss and sorrow, while also being about beauty and grace.
How do we wait? We live with radical love. We hold the ambiguity and uncertainty of our lives with humility, patience, and courage. We face the world with bravery, choosing to take joy with gratitude and sorrow without resentment.
Tonight, we'll light the last candle, symbolizing love--the love of Christ, the love of god which sent Christ into the world to live and die for us. The love which binds the world and heals our hearts and fills us with light. Sometimes it is hard to feel that love--hard to feel love for (or from) ourselves, others, or God. But part of Christmas is believing that love is there. And that it has the power to change lives. If it does anything, the Christmas story reminds me where love is found--in small, simple, unremarkable places; but that those people and places are sanctified through the love, touch, and arrival of God.
Thinking about the small and simple ways love makes itself grandly manifest in our lives reminds me of a quote by the literary critic Terry Eagleton:
"Salvation turns out to be an embarrassingly prosaic affair--a matter of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned. It has no 'religious' glamour or aura whatsoever. Anybody can do it. The key to the universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation. [. . .] The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars."
There are so many different ways to view love. Love is grand, but love is simple. It is through those ties that bind us to each other; it is love which ultimately heals us and brings us back to the presence of God.
It is love that we wait for, and it is love that comes to us as a gift, even (especially) when we are far from deserving it. It strengthens, it comforts, it supports, it fills, it heals.
[j. kirk richards, christ among the lepers
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Whatever your beliefs this holiday season, I wish you hope, peace, joy, and love. And in whatever you are waiting for, I hope you find direction, resolve, courage, and comfort during the waiting.
Merry Christmas.
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