Advent in This Particular and Hectic World

Is it Advent? Or Christmas? The conversation is never over at my church, where the lust for Christmas tunes and Christmas spirit encroaches on the solemn weeks of waiting we call Advent. The idea of this season is to lean in to darkness and expectation, to charity, to stillness. But who are we kidding? Stillness? The idealist in me wants to do each thing in turn – and do it well. Advent, and then Christmas. But I’ve learned to be suspicious of my ideals, and when I have the wisdom to lean toward the real, I never regret it, and I usually find God there.

It’s not Christmas yet, we can complain together. And besides, Christmas has a season of its own: twelve days over the turn of the year. But those days get short shrift in this real world of ours, where our schools and our employers and our relatives are all riding the wave of Holiday Spirit by the middle of November each year. The Christmas parties don’t happen on December 26 or January 3, no matter how much we’d like them to. The congregation in the pews shrinks right when the liturgically-oriented among us are ready to start singing about the baby in the manger–and shouldn’t we all sing about this, and not for one night only? I say give up. “Let them eat cake!” perhaps…?

Last Sunday from the organ loft my staff singers began our worship for the Second Sunday of Advent with Mendelssohn/Isaiah: “How lovely are the messengers that preach us the gospel of peace.” Their duet was my nod to the actual season, and my clever way of validating the incursion of Christmas on our worship for the week, as the sermon was going to be replaced by a dozen children in costumes gathering around a giant three-dimensional star hanging from a pole and a tiny doll in a manger, taking turns reading Seuss-style poetry about the birth of Jesus. The kids were bringing us the gospel of peace–lovely messengers indeed, and silly and sweet and, quite frankly, hectic. And while they might be two weeks early by our calendar, they were right on time with the call of John in the day’s lectionary text. I’ll allow it.

And they were right on time with the world we inhabit. The month of December is stuffed to the gills. Thursday morning in the first week of Advent I kept an appointment with my spiritual director–a gift to myself of one hour of stillness and contemplation. That night I played music for the women’s Christmas dessert (which we call an Advent dessert, but let’s be honest, those tables weren’t loaded with Advent decorations…). Meanwhile I was busy making arrangements for a group of folks to spend Saturday afternoon Christmas caroling to our shut-ins. Sunday would be the Christmas play, and also the gig I’d (thank goodness!) turned down accompanying the Swedish folk singers at their holiday banquet. (Instead I spent the afternoon and evening procuring and decorating a Christmas tree with my family.) And there would be rehearsals and performances for school Christmas concerts filling the following days. People and Christmas cheer everywhere all the time. Hectic indeed.

I’m not alone in finding my small ways to hold space for what Advent “should” be. I buy our Christmas gifts on Cyber Monday and then challenge myself to spend as little money as possible in December. This year I resumed our family’s tradition of “Soup and Prayer” during penitential seasons – inviting friends to show up to share a pot of something warm and a half hour of Psalms & Canticles. But if I’m honest, these are only tokens. Like punctuation, they just place the tiniest pause in the noise. What do we do about the noise?

I say we embrace it. Go ahead and meld Christmas and Advent together, because that’s the world we live in: the actual, particular, present people we share life with. If Advent is a season where we “make room” and “prepare the way” for Christ in our hearts, what can be better than to make room, also, for the place and time and people we have been given? Christ came, incarnate, to a particular time. He came with a new kingdom: the restoration of love as Way; the undoing of the curse that separated us from the God of love; the baptism of the Holy Spirit of peace, who calls and equips us to make love our architecture. My love for Jesus happens most truly in my love for my neighbor. Saints and scholars for centuries have said this: You are Christ to me. I am Christ to you.

When I came to that quiet hour with my spiritual director asking the question “What does Advent look like for me this year? How do I make room for Christ?” I left without a concrete answer. I did not find it in the stillness. Instead, I found it in the bustle that followed – the bustle that was competing with my liturgical instincts. I found it in the wild sprint from organ to choir room in the middle of a service to grab the music I’d left behind in the chaos of assembling all the day’s moving parts. I found it in the people encroaching on my imagined devotion. The people, it turns out, are my devotion. By laying down my conception of an orderly progression from the stillness of Advent to the joy of Christmas; by allowing the co-existence of these two spirits as a submission to the particular world I’ve been blessed to receive, by making room in my schedule for my people – be they shut-ins, offspring, costumed church kids, or the general population giddy to pre-game the celebration – I am making room in my heart for Christ.