Today I rushed the season...the season of Advent that is. From the picture you can see me wearing all purple (I know, I know, I might be more up to date if it were cerulean blue) and you can't see it but I am also wearing the beautiful pendant that Nancye Dunlap gave me a few years ago, with the outline of Bethlehem on it. It was fun. Wearing purple and the necklace, I mean. Okay, and I also put up the Christmas tree....so I guess I was rushing another season, too.
I also started today Robert Webber's book Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year. How I came into possession of this book is itself a bit of a story. About four years I was sitting in Hal Knight's office at Saint Paul. Hal has more books than anybody I know. He has them categorized. When you take any class of his, be prepared to bring a tote sack for the large bibliographies he is known to give you. On this particular day, I was there (for a reason I have forgotten) and I gazed up and saw Webber's Ancient Future Faith with which I was then and am now very familiar, and right next to it was Ancient Future Time. I believe I must have said a time or two that I really wish I had that book, when after I had said it the third time, Hal simply got up, went to his bookcase, and gave me the book. Anyway, I have never read it. It is, to say the least, my kind of book. This picture was just me acting silly so I could get a blog pic (Cana took it)...most of my reading today took place in the snack bar at Target in Ward Parkway, where Cana felt called to go this afternoon (not the snack bar, the sale clothing area in juniors)
The focus of the book isn't just to teach about the Christian year, but it is to help the reader to focus her life in the life of Christ, which the Christian year celebrates and to live in the events of Christ's life, so that all time is ordered by it. The Christian year is not a rote order to use, that soon becomes only repetitious each year, and deadens our senses to the spirit. Instead, Webber states, and I certainly agree, that to hold to the celebrations and seasons of the liturgical year, means that we can live WITH Christ in a way that we cannot without it.
My belief is that Advent invites us to wait. To wait in hope. And to wait already fully aware that what we are waiting for has already come. It is the time, early in the season when we face the grandly mysterious promises that Christ will come again. It is the time when days grow shorter and we yearn for light. It is the time when winter comes and holds us in its grip, and the pink candle among the purple winks at us and says, yes, wait, but with anticipation and joy. It is the time of asking Christ, the long expected one to come, and to dress the house and to wait, and to not hurry to the end, for its in the yearning forward that our spirit lives are lit with passion and hope.
Have a blessed Advent, friends.
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