Welcome to Advent, this season of celebrating darkness and light. The Earth is making her way once again to the shortest hours of daylight (read this as the opposite if your in the southern hemisphere). For those in the U.S., the harvest festival has come, and we have many reasons for continuing to give thanks.
In many ways Advent is about waiting - a waiting of the tenses: Christ has come, Christ comes, Christ will come again ... . It is also a waiting of the senses: the hours of daylight are getting shorter, we find ourselves baking sweet things, we listen to and sing carols, ... . The season of Advent is an invitation to contemplation.
Where do we sometimes find ourselves resisting such an invitation? In our consumeristic rush to have Christmas come quickly and then be over so we might purchase some other gadget our gizmo, do we miss something?
I thought the following quote fitting for this discussion:
"I did not know when I went [to Cuba the first time] that I would be forced to make the voyage over again. I did not know that it would lead me into the labyrinth of solitude, that it would change my outlook, my attitude to the world around me, my appraisal of myself; that it ... would change my way of thinking and living, would change my understanding. Just as the ocean wears away the rocks and bends the contour of the shore to its will, so it washes over a man's [sic.] mind, smoothing the sharp edges, knocking off the conceits, flattening the prejudices so that he is left with a different instrument with which to govern his life."
~ Frank Mulville. Dear Dolphin. Sheridan House (1992). 29.
May Advent provide times for contemplation, times of wearing away, that you maybe smoothed, and whole.
Blessed Be,
Joel
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