Waiting for Advent

 

Thanksgiving night, I sat at my desk, trying to keep the cat from tipping over my glass of iced tea while waiting for the fresh apple pie to cool enough to eat. I had no leftovers, as I’d eaten Thanksgiving dinner with friends on Wednesday, due to work schedules. That dinner was magnificent. I have never seen a turkey more golden brown. The vegetables were wonderful, and the company was the best a person could have. My friend promised to deliver leftovers in a day or so. (The prospect of turkey sandwiches and pumpkin cheesecake makes my mouth water.)

I like Thanksgiving. I like fall. I love almost anything pumpkin and can’t wait to have real turkey, rather than the deli-sliced kind. I love the cooler temperatures this time of year, and as I lay in bed, a breeze came up that set my tube wind chimes ringing. The chimes reminded me to be thankful for family, friends, my cats, the roof over my head, food in the fridge and favorite dishes to come, and really, all the blessings of life. I try to do that every day, but somehow it is much more important to be thankful for specificities of life, not just ‘Thanks for everything, God.”

One thing I always feel grateful for on Thanksgiving is that Advent is close at hand. Advent is my favorite church season. Oh, I love the exuberance of Christmas, the searching of Epiphany, the penitence of Lent, the joy of Easter, and, although not nearly as much, the length of Pentecost season. Still, it is Advent that I love the most. 

Advent is a time for reflection, meditation, and expectation. It is a time that when I hear of Mary’s pregnancy, reminding me of my own, both of us anticipating our births. My “baby” is grown now, but I have pictures of his blond curls, bright blue eyes, and chubby cheeks when he was a baby and toddler. Advent reminds me of these things more poignantly than any other time of year. 

Advent is a quiet time, though people seem busy, buying gifts, decorating, baking cakes, cookies, and pies for gifts and entertaining, attending the kids’ concerts and sports events, and extra meetings and rehearsals. Sometimes it feels hard to catch one’s breath with all the busy-ness around. And yet, Advent begs us to take time to sit and simply be – something we don’t do very often, much to the potential detriment of our spiritual lives.

Advent focuses on the coming of Messiah. It is a history lesson of the teachings of prophets and wise people who weren’t necessarily speaking of Jesus. Christians have been taught these prophecies were fulfilled in Bethlehem and the manger. Still, the stories in Matthew and Luke are the ones we have been taught since childhood, perhaps not factually accurate, we look forward to hearing them again through Advent and into Christmas.

The word “Advent” means “Coming,” as in the first or second coming of Christ. It indicates a forthcoming event or celebration. Purple was once the color for Advent, treated as a shorter penitential season, like Lent. Now a medium (serum) blue is often used, the Virgin Mary’s cloak. Blue represents purity, the sky, and the cloak of an Empress in the Byzantine tradition.

The Advent wreath seen in homes and churches during the season, with three blue or purple candles lit week by week, and a fourth candle being, for “Gaudette Sunday.” On Gaudette Sunday, one takes a breath to lighten before the big push towards Christmas Even and the Christmas season. The larger white candle in the center of the wreath is lit on Christmas Eve, the “Christ candle,” for the arrival of the Christ child.  

What might it take to spend a few minutes every day to meditate on the coming of Christ and what his coming might means to us as Christians in a secular world? What might we give up doing to make time for that meditation or reflection? What might we gain by it? What might we lose by ignoring it?

I’m happy Advent begins tomorrow. I may put my tree up early instead of waiting for a time closer to Christmas, but our family tradition means something to me. I will contemplate traditions and what they mean and quietly try to sit so God has time to get a word in edgewise. I invite you to do the same.

Happy Advent. Celebrate well! And Happy New Year to the church whose liturgical year begins the same day.

God bless.

A Tale of Socks -- and saints

Once upon a time there was a small city, an ordinary small city, full of people, ordinary everyday people.

 

One morning the people of the city woke up to find dirty socks all over. They were in the trees in the park, they were along the sides of the streets in front of the banks and real estate offices and department stores and even the school. There were dirty socks on the steps of one church and draped over the tombstones in the cemetery at another. They were under the overpass and over the underpass. Some flew from car antennas like flags while others lay on the well-manicured lawns of the city's wealthier citizens and on the front steps of the modest homes further out, looking from a distance as if someone had planted a haphazard carpet of flowers everywhere across the manicured grass. Granted, they were colorful socks, all the colors of the rainbow, plus argyle, patterned and even some that looked as if the rainbow had been put together with a Mixmaster. But they all had had things in common: they were dirty, they were everywhere and they didn't belong where they were.

The people of the city had different thoughts about what to do. The Mayor gave a press conference promising to call the City Council into session immediately to study the problem and formulate an appropriate response, hopefully without raising taxes too much in the process. At the morning prayer services the minister and the priest prayed for deliverance from the potential health hazard the socks could pose as well as for the safety and well-being of those who would have to clean up the mess. 

Teachers kept the children inside for fear of air-borne pollutants causing asthma attacks. The Senior Citizen's lunch brigade issued face masks for their delivery people and the hospital emergency room geared up for a full-fledged epidemic. The drug store sold out of antibiotic hand cleaner within minutes. Arguments broke out as to whether someone ought to go pick up just socks of one color or one pattern but leave the rest for someone else. The police called out the forensics team to investigate, take samples and rush back to the lab to perform their arcane rites over possible bits of epithelial cells or stray cat hairs. All in all, it was a gigantic mess and nobody seemed to know quite what to do.

Meanwhile the socks just sat there. People from the golf club looked at them, looked at their own preferred style of socks and decided it wasn't their problem because the ones lying around weren't their socks and wandered off to the bar to at least play the 19th hole since the other 18 were covered in multicolored socks. The mothers in the SUVs taking their children to piano lessons, soccer practice, dance class or karate tried to dodge the ones in the street and warned the children not to touch the socks on their way to and from their various venues. The service workers' union looked at the situation and found a clause in their contracts that precluded their participation in an activity not specifically enumerated as "their job" like fire, rescue, transportation or refuse pickup of items not placed inside the specified containers or community-approved plastic bags.

Even people on the street had their own reactions. Some walked by, looking anywhere but where a sock was and pretending that there really wasn't anything wrong at all. Some trod a careful path through the socks, being careful not to step on any or come in contact with them at all. Some looked out their windows at home and decided they really didn't need that milk from the store and even those who had unbreakable appointments they'd waited months to get thought that perhaps the sore tooth or the routine examination could wait another day or two. 

Many of the office personnel at the various offices called in sick or claimed they couldn't get out of their driveways due to the piles of socks the city's snowplow had tried to use to clear paths for busses and truckloads of emergency equipment and supplies to use. After all, they all thought, those socks didn't belong to them, they weren't responsible for the socks being there so it was up to someone to find out whose socks they were and compel them to clean up the mess. And so the socks sat.

Then somebody noticed something odd. Someone was walking down the street, bending over and actually not only touching but picking up socks and putting them in a brown paper sack. It didn't happen just once but over and over again, one sock at a time. Then there was a little kid pulling a red wagon, also bending over and picking up socks, one at a time, and putting them in the wagon. They weren't even separating them according to color if washing them were their intent. Knee socks, ankle socks, novelty socks, plain, fancy, basic white and wildly colored, they were all the same and all went into the bag or the wagon.

Sighs of relief went up all over town. Everybody returned to their more or less normal busynesses. Almost everybody, that is, all but the person with the sack and the child with the wagon, both of whom, had anybody taken time to notice, weren't wearing any socks at all --- or even any shoes.

Essay originally published on Jericho's Daughter, October 31, 2009.

Published at Speaking to the Soul on Episcopal Café, Saturday, November 13, 2021.

Prayer and Study

 

When I pray, I speak to God, and when I study Torah, God speaks to me. – Rabbi Louis Finkelstein

We as Christians talk about prayer often; it's one of the basics of our faith journey. What we don't always think about is the need to study. For us, it isn't just Torah (the first five books of what we call the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures), but also the prophecies, poetry, writings (the Tanakh), gospels, epistles and all.

It is one thing to read the Bible straight through and think we've covered it. We read strange stories with people doing things we can't understand and can't figure out how such things got into the word of God. But through study, consultation with commentaries, pastors, theologians, and the like, we begin to understand that there is more here than just a simple reading will provide. 

Through study, we gain an understanding of the world of the Bible as it was. We learn why people sometimes did unthinkable things and how God could condone it, much less authorize it. We learn that even though some of the stories might not be 100% factual (CNN hadn't been invented yet), and many stories were not written down until centuries or even millennia after they were first told, there is a profound truth lying underneath them for us to discover, examine and take to heart. 

The process of theological reflection allows us to work a process where we look at something in four different ways – through the lenses of culture, tradition, personal position, and actions that can be taken. Sometimes, we find a new light on something we've not understood before, or perhaps something we had not considered through prayer and meditation. Prayer can be incorporated into this process, as we invite God into our deliberations, whether personal or communal. 

We shouldn't give up learning just because we've completed high school or college or any kind of formal or informal schooling. If we stop learning, we stop growing. We pray to communicate with God, but we study to understand what God has to tell us through the words of the Bible and prayer.   

As we read in Sirach, "How different the one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High!" (38:34).  Prayer lets us talk to God, but study allows us to be open to God's messages to us.

God bless. 

Originally published at Speaking to the Soul on Episcopal Café, Saturday, November 7, 2021.