From Dec. 10: Advent

Christmas will be here in two weeks.
[take a breath]
I was commenting to someone recently that it usually takes me about 2 weeks of Advent to realize that it actually is Advent—somehow Christmas always seems to come so suddenly. No wonder the readings leading up to Advent all talk about the need to keep awake! But somehow every year, I’m never awake quite enough until about halfway through.

It’s Advent—a season of preparation, hope, anticipation. We still use purple liturgically, linking it to the penitential sense of Lent, but a more optimistic blue is increasingly popular with our protestant sisters and brothers. But you don’t need it to be December to feel hopeful. Our church year repeats itself in miniature in our lives. We’ve all had the experience of Good Friday in the height of Pentecost, and we’ve all experienced tiny Easters in the depths of Lent. Our church year leads us intentionally through a cycle of spiritual experience that we might go through in the cycle of just one day.

The medieval mystic Bernard of Clairvaux talks about how there are actually three advents—two visible, and one invisible. The first advent is the one we always think of—the advent of Jesus the Christ child, born of Mary. The third is the one we look toward at the end of days—as the Eucharistic prayer has it, “we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” The second advent is in the middle, in our own lives, right now. Christ is coming today! In Advent, we turn our attention to preparing, and waiting, but it’s preparation and waiting for Christ who is NOW as well as Christ who is coming. The very technological theologian way of saying it is “already not yet.” Just as with the Trinity we have to forget out to count (1+1+1=1, not 3), with Advent we have to forget to tell time.

Here and now, though, time goes forward, forward, forward, no matter what I do.
It’s already Thursday of the second week of the month and we’re still working on the parish newsletter. In the midst of getting anxious about it this morning I paused for morning prayer online—I like the missionstclare.com website for the Daily Office—and I snapped out of it (for the moment, at least).

Christmas is coming, God is present. Christ has been, will be, and is, right here and right now: whether or not our work is finished, whether we’ve had enough sleep, whether the dishes are done. Thanks be to God, alleluia, alleluia.