What is Advent?

(A blog in three parts) First, it Means Waiting

Advent means beginning. It’s the start of something new. For example, it’s the root of the word “ADVENTure” — the beginnings of something a bit mysterious, exciting, sometimes hoped for, sometimes totally unexpected. But before the ‘thing’ comes, one must wait, be patient. Like many have learned during this year of pandemic and pandemonium, confusion and chaos, suffering and sadness, it takes endurance and perseverance, yes, but something more…

I’m planning an “adventure” to New Zealand. It was to happen in March, but of course, with Covid precautions, there’ll be no traveling in the next several months. I’ve waited (probably since Lord of the Rings came out — 19 years ago!) and I must continue to wait … postponing, delaying; this is not one of those difficult waits, in fact it brings joy to anticipate, to dream, to plan, to WAIT until the time is right.

But not all waiting is a delight, just as not all planned-for adventures are delightful. I’ve consistently found that the best things in life come as surprises; have you noticed that? The fussiest planning for a journey or a holiday, often ends up in disappointment or even calamity — at least for me. I could write a book about the planning that turned into catastrophe but also of the ‘surprises’ that took my breath away. The gentle ones. Those that blew my socks off, that left me awestruck.

“One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.” C.S.Lewis — The Horse and His Boy. When it comes to the ADVENT story — the adventure of the mysteries of Christmas — let’s not miss them. Think about all the people who were doing business, finding accommodations, visiting relatives, and so on, in a Bethlehem bustling with the census business Caesar Augustus had decreed. Did they notice an unusually bright star? A brightly lit choir of angels over a nearby pasture? A young pregnant woman on a donkey? I’m sure they did know the world was dark, ruled by unpredictable tyrants, sick and suffering: an insecure and scary place to be. Sound familiar? But in the midst of faces cast down with the banal and the dismal, what are we missing because we’re too busy, because we’re not looking up?

There was a time in history when “the world in quiet stillness lay” the carol- writer pens, and the apostle Luke writes: “In the fullness of time…” That is, when the time was right. And most of the time we do not have control over exactly when that time is come — not if it’s a true Adventure. Not if it’s both the best AND the most exciting thing.

And all this happens when the universe wills; when processes and occurrences intersect — much like the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn/Regulus for “the Kingly Star” or “The Bethlehem Star” we can witness right now. In this moment in Time.

It Begins when Advent is complete and the time is full. Like a long-awaited birth. Times are dark. The tragedies and failures of 2020 have been spoken of endlessly and indeed it has been a bleak year, much like Christina Rosetti’s lovely poem about mid-winter — our entire last year has been dark with unexpected disasters, events and times. Surely, the Universe — Mother Earth, Father God — whatever you call the design behind it all — will, as always, bring something good.

Maybe the dark place of this disastrous year of 2020 is birthing something good in us, or with us. Like a seedling in a dark place. Like a fetus in a womb. We have to wait, but life, a new creation, will come. Like a new mother must wait to see, Mary waited “and hid all these things in her heart” before, during, and after the Christ child was born. May we wait patiently and remember all these things and realize “Lest a seed go into the ground…” Stifling blackness before life.

Tonight we may still go outside and look into the vast infinity of the universe, with its forbidding awesome distances, and in its quiet, look up and see The Star.

More about that in the next blog, on Christmas Day. Shalom (Next week: lessons learned in the 2020 pandemonium…about Silence and Solitude as lost arts in the journey for creation and fulfillment.)