The difference between resting and going back to sleep

An Advent Invitation

I keep thinking of that line, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.” Maybe that rings true. Or it might make you cringe. Because Advent is also the most *all the things* time of the year.

There are joys, of course, especially if you’re lucky enough to have children around who bring their wonder and curiosity to the familiar stories and traditions.

I love pulling out holiday decorations that are a mixture of funky old ornaments made in preschool or at church on a Sunday morning, the elaborate nativity set my mom gave me thirty years ago, mementos from trips and births and deaths, and other beauties received or collected over the years. It’s a good kind of remembering that holds measures of the bittersweet and the lovely.

For the natural world, Advent and Christmas are a time of slowing down. A season of dropping leaves, short days, and long winter nights. There is an invitation for us in this to turn inward and do less, not more. We feel this instinctively, even if we resist it. As Gayle Boss writes in All Creation Waits, “Advent has always been about helping us absorb the mystery that death, without fail, opens to a new beginning…The dark is not an end, but a door. This is the way a new beginning comes.” (There is a lovely children’s version as well).

I had a chance to take part in an Abbey of the Arts retreat last month for the Celtic holiday Samhein (/saw-when/). I learned that Samhein is the Celtic New Year, a liminal season of death and new life that we retain a shadow of in Halloween. During the retreat, Simon de Voil made the point that seasons are just long enough to feel permanent. He maintains that thresholds like Samhein/Halloween and Advent help us tap into the sense of what is fleeting and what is eternal. And those thresholds help us reach into the future, into wholeness. Speaking of thresholds, hear his lovely version of Mary’s Magnificat here.

Polly (a wise elder who lives in Iona and whose last name I forgot to record) named the sense of longing among retreat participants. It was a single echoing word, compassion, compassion, compassion. Yes, exactly. She invited us to ponder this question:

‘What is the difference between resting and going back to sleep?’

All this is at odds with a sense of responsibility, particularly for women, to over-function to make everything beautiful, magical, and meaningful. I’m unlearning this, but it takes time.

We are in good company in all these things in Advent. It is a time of surprising thresholds and holy announcements. It is a time to join Mary in pondering and treasuring divine callings, to wonder anew at an infant God in a stable, to ask about our role in welcoming Love’s ways in this season.

Starting right where we are. Weary, full of questions, and in need of permission to grieve broken dreams, promises, and all that is dark in the world instead of rushing to glitter and joy.

As I wrote in Hopeful Lament, when the shepherds came, Mary was starting “to see the extent to which she was part of something wonderful, realizing that though the plan she’d been invited to was occasionally confusing and often difficult, it was poised to end in goodness and mercy. We are also invited to fan the flames of hope even when grief is longer and more complicated than we wish it were.”

In his final work published before his death earlier this year, Walter Brueggemann wrote,

“For a long time we have thought, in US society, that we could construct systems of reality that were beyond critique and immune to threat. And now we know better. Knowing better is an opportunity for thinking and acting otherwise. It is also an invitation to reflect (reflect upon!) the One who is more than any of our systems of management and control. Among conservatives this “more than” has been fossilized and relegated to past action. But now we know! Among progressives this “more than” had been made academic and close to irrelevant. But now we know! Our little systems are ceasing to be before our very eyes, because this living, acting “more than they” is making all things new, new in ways that do not conform to our “little systems.”

Spiritual director and writer Terri Conlin created some lovely reflection cards for Advent. Today’s reads:

“God’s promises need time to ripen.
We make room for them by waiting with hope.”

She shares this breath prayer:

Inhale:
Your promise will come in time.

Exhale:
I can wait with hope.

Yes, all things new. But not yet.