Meaning of Advent: Arrival. In the Christian Church, it is also the time traditionally set aside for remembering and celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas. This year, Advent lasted from Sunday, December 3, to Sunday, December, 24. Hope, peace, joy, and love were the primary teachings of Jesus, and these are the four principles emphasized during this time of remembrance as we awaited the celebration of a holy birth.
Christmas arrived. Now it is December 26, a day full of so many things in our crazy, wonderful culture: sales, returned merchandise, indigestion from too many Christmas goodies, dealing with the cookie crumbs and glitter embedded into the carpet, stray wrapping paper and ribbon floating around the house, Christmas trees dropping needles, company departing, kids and dogs and cats crazed from too much excitement, adults exhausted. Depression, let-down, loneliness, looking ahead to the next stimulating activity, hunting for batteries for new devices, wondering where to stash all the debris until we can put out the garbage, a general feeling of malaise . . .
Hope, peace, joy, and love? — concepts so big, almost un-comprehendable — and at the same time, so simple — what do we do with them if they have indeed arrived? Can we fit them in around the edges? Are they guiding stars? Canes upon which we depend as we walk on uneven ground? What do they even mean?
Those four words are so short, so easy to say, so familiar, but even after 77 years of earnestly trying (at least most of the time!), I still have no real, experiential sense of what they mean. I guess if they were real in our individual lives, they’d be real in our communities and in our world.
What I have learned is that in order for me to even approach an awareness of what these concepts are about, I have to be willing to acknowledge also their dark cousins — the despair, conflict, sorrow, and hatred within me. And that’s so hard. Who wants to look at that, let alone experience it?
Opposite sides to the same coin — how can we know what hope is if we haven’t experienced its opposite, despair? Or peace if we don’t know what conflict is like . . . And who would know what joy is if they haven’t experienced the dark night of the soul in sorrow . . . And can we really know what the depths of love are if we haven’t acknowledged our own hidden places of hatred?
It’s a lot easier to dig that leftover Christmas glitter outa the carpet than it is to do this kind of inner work as you journey through the year to come. But I wish us all well, me included, as we do it. My commitment to myself was that I would write my own reflections during the season of Advent, and give them wings into the outer world. I didn’t check to see who, if anyone, those words reached. But if it was you, thank you so much for reading them! I hope at least one thought might have made your journey a little easier, with a smile, a chuckle, a new idea, or even — wow! — an insight.
And a new year full of promise to each of you!
