Already Advent
Moving through the distress and despair together
It feels like Advent has already come.
Before I have even put away the fall pumpkins, it has announced itself. It won’t officially begin for several more weeks but it feels like it’s already here. There are signs everywhere I turn: in the sun, the moon and the stars. The whole earth is full distress. Confusion overwhelms and sea roars with lament.
In the Christian calendar this year, Advent begins with similar words from the Gospel of Luke. There is a hope that something is coming that will change our present. Something will happen that will bring change, the kind of change that we have dreamed about for so long.
We don’t know what will come or who will come. Nothing is certain except for this stubborn hope for change. It’s what Advent feels like every year. There is this uncertain hope of how God will come into the world again. And we hope it will happen again. We hope that there will be change but all we really know is the distress. As one of my directees wisely observed yesterday, we cannot stay here. We can live into the despair.
We must find our way through the distress.
There is no way that we can know what is coming, no matter how much we might like to know. We can read between the lines. We can hope that it will not be as bad as we fear but we don’t know.
We cannot know what is coming. We can organize and plan for every possible outcome but there is no way for us to know the future. Advent invites us to slow down and pay attention. It calls us to be alert and awake to all that is happening. It dares us to feel all that comes, to let those emotions stir us to understand what is going on in us and in the world around us.
I am tempted to turn everything off. I don’t want to hear my phone buzz with a new alert. I don’t even want to hear the coffee machine beep at me and found myself hushing my children for being too loud just last night. I didn’t just hush them. I yelled. My frustration with all that is uncertain right now exploded. It hit the two people in the world I love most. I couldn’t explain it to them. I don’t have words yet for what I am feeling. I could only wrap them in my arms and whisper apologies. I could only tell them I love them, again and again.
This is how Advent ends. God responds to our distress and despair with love. A tiny child is born. We don’t know what will happen from that moment but something has shifted. Birth has come and we must decide how we will grow along with this revelation of love.
This morning, after my coffee maker beeped at me, I opened Morgan Harper Nichols’ book Peace is a Practice to be reminded how cyclical our lives are. She writes,
“Every single day, we work through the exciting and the mundane and every moment in between, one minute at a time. The sunlight still finds us, even as we make our way down the same hallways each day. Sunlight still finds us, even as we go to the same jobs and deal with the same problems every day. We learn to love and to say goodbye, and we learn to grow and wait, season after season.”
It’s this repetition of the seasons that I love in the Christian calendar. We come to these same stories again and again, year after year, and discover that we have grown and changed. Consider the cycle of growth you are in right now. What are you learning about yourself and the world around you? Where is the sunlight finding you every single day?
As you try to be awake and alert to all that is happening, let this simple body practice remind your body to be fully present. Make it part of your routine as together we try to understand the birth of love with each and every one of us.
If you are looking for ways to be more alert and awake to your own heart in this Advent season, I’ve created a new resource with 12 expansive litanies and weekly reflections that encourage you to find new ways to always be Listening Through Silence. You can find this resource and more in my shop on Dandelion Marketplace.
