A post I wrote this week for American Public Media’s OnBeing blog:
Advent is my kind of season.
Not the pseudo-Advent of most Christian piety (liturgically-correct texts and hymns on the Sundays of the season and full-on Christmas hoopla all the other days). No, not that Advent but this one: the ancient, autumnal interval of darkness and foreboding
with its achy uncertainty blanketing landscapes both inner and outer. This Advent offers room for doubt and struggle; it grants permission to rest in — rather than to resolve — the tensions and paradoxes, the sometimes maddening contradictions that shape the life of discipleship.
We read the appointed texts for the Sundays of Advent and they are startling in their bleakness, their familiarity inuring us to meanings inscrutable, ominous, perilous. (Unless we subscribe to the Left Behind school of hermeneutics, in which liturgical Advent doesn’t exist and these texts are never bad news for us).
To read the rest click here.
November 29, 2011 at 3:31 pm
What a grace-filled sharing. thank you. I now have an Advent, where before i had stuff to do.
December 1, 2011 at 4:06 pm
Thank you for the richness of the word, the emotions, the symbols and meanings that you weave and present to take me/us more deeply into this season. In my work with Christian communities that enter Advent fresh from a fall seeking to discover anew the context of their calling, there is a felt need to confess what blocks us from receiving God’s gift. With hope they anticipate a deeper understanding of what it means for God to be en fleshed even more faithfully in us. They look for the Spirit’s lead to embody the gift of God with us in the year ahead.
December 2, 2011 at 9:41 am
Thanks, Dan.
December 24, 2011 at 6:01 am
[...] of supposed to be a little depressing. As one of my favorite bloggers puts it, Advent is “the ancient, autumnal interval of darkness and foreboding with its achy uncertainty blanketing lan…“ (Looks like someone else might be a wee depressive around the [...]