Last Saturday some of my closest friends from college and I had our annual Christmas party. We all ate a potluck Christmas dinner, had a white elephant gift exchange, sang Christmas carols (including my favorite, O Come O Come Emmanuel), read reflective Christmas Scripture passages, drank Kenyan tea, ate decorated sugar cookies, and played games like Catch Phrase and Taboo. It was lovely and restful and the first time this season I felt I was truly practicing Advent, fully anticipating the celebration of Christ's birth on the 25th.
Christmas is always the lightest spiritual season for me, a time when heavy questions about why there's so much suffering in the world quiet down and I'm left with an awe of the lengths that this God I don't understand took to connect with us. The red and green and gold everywhere make life feel a little crisper, a little cleaner to me. There was snow on the ground a few mornings ago, bright even as it melted.
The physical celebration of Christmas, the hunting down and wrapping and giving of gifts, the travel home, the decorating, the baking--all things I love--sometimes requires so much physical energy that I have little strength or time to take in and store up the hope Christmas offers, the knowledge that humanity is not left alone on earth. With Christmas only days away, I was a bit frustrated and disappointed going into the party that I hadn't taken in much of the spiritual rest Advent offers.
As I experienced this unease of missing out, I remembered a required reading from my senior year at JBU, a quote from a contemporary English Benedictine nun named Maria Boulding:
“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.”
So this morning, as I prepare for the drive back to East Texas, as I pack and load up my car with my miniature dachshund and her bed and the presents and all the luggage I think I need for the three-day trip, that hopeful thought is enough--We are walking with the God who comes to us in our wondering and our weariness, and there is a mercy beyond anything we could suspect.
Christmas is always the lightest spiritual season for me, a time when heavy questions about why there's so much suffering in the world quiet down and I'm left with an awe of the lengths that this God I don't understand took to connect with us. The red and green and gold everywhere make life feel a little crisper, a little cleaner to me. There was snow on the ground a few mornings ago, bright even as it melted.
The physical celebration of Christmas, the hunting down and wrapping and giving of gifts, the travel home, the decorating, the baking--all things I love--sometimes requires so much physical energy that I have little strength or time to take in and store up the hope Christmas offers, the knowledge that humanity is not left alone on earth. With Christmas only days away, I was a bit frustrated and disappointed going into the party that I hadn't taken in much of the spiritual rest Advent offers.
As I experienced this unease of missing out, I remembered a required reading from my senior year at JBU, a quote from a contemporary English Benedictine nun named Maria Boulding:
“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.”
So this morning, as I prepare for the drive back to East Texas, as I pack and load up my car with my miniature dachshund and her bed and the presents and all the luggage I think I need for the three-day trip, that hopeful thought is enough--We are walking with the God who comes to us in our wondering and our weariness, and there is a mercy beyond anything we could suspect.
