Starry, Starry Night
Advent always begins in the gloaming: We’ve been losing daylight steadily since the summer solstice and the lessons of 1st Advent are always a jolt. We begin not with our fine and familiar Isaiah of hummable Handel fame, but with a Jeremiah whose community is girded in gloom, though his own message of the day holds the promise of light. Each year we hear from a mature Jesus speaking of the end-times, hardly a holly, jolly, deck the halls kind of fellow. And the gospels of mid-Advent don’t trot out biblical elves intent on upping our Christmas spirit. Instead prickly John the Baptizer confronts us, John the B who will never make it to favored Hallmark stature. It’s only on 4th Advent, that final Sunday before the feast toward which we incline, that we hear about impending birth, only then that the liturgy bends us toward the so-called reason for the season. During the High Holy Days of the Jewish liturgical calendar, there is one service during which the end of the Torah is read, immediately followed by the reading of its beginning. Advent does something like that for us. Beginning with a vision of the end of days before us courtesy of a grown-up Jesus in the full flower of his about-to-be-ended public ministry, we roll back through the stories of John the Baptizer to the very onset of Jesus’ active life and we end at the beginning on the cusp of his birth. We begin with the future and end with the past which also paradoxically leads us forward. No human life is utterly suffused with clarity; each of us has some murkiness with which to contend. Perhaps it’s fear or bereftness – like Jeremiah’s contemporaries – or loneliness or a sense of inadequacy or betrayal. Some of us get so used to our disjunctions that we build a nest there, make it paradoxically comfy because it is familiar. Advent begins in these uncomfortable places and leads us steadily to more stable ground because it knows that a sense of dis-ease pervades some of our seasons, is a place we inhabit, a reality. But Advent beckons to another reality, to the simplicity of the infant who will grow up to be the Light of the world. Advent calls us out of our nocturnal niches, reminds us and reaffirms that we are made of the very stuff that lights up our night sky. We are star-stuff and, according to Genesis, we are God-stuff. The Incarnation, whatever else it may have come to symbolize, means precisely that. What do you think? Amid the stressors lurking in the frenetic forces of the season, along with the shopping and the shipping and the worry over bills, can you find the time and the courage to tend the flame within you, nurture it so that by the close of Advent and the beginning of the 12 Days, you will be as shot full of radiance as the church in which you worship on Christmas Eve? I think you can. I pray you will. A member of Forma’s Board of Directors, Vicki Garvey has been serving as secretary this year. A lifelong learner and educator, she has taught at most levels professionally from junior and senior high to college to graduate school with her longest tenure teaching Biblical Theology and Languages at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. These days, she exercises her teaching/learning passions as Bishop’s Associate for Lifelong Christian Formation in the Diocese of Chicago where she is responsible for: consulting with congregations about formation and education programs and processes, overseeing formation for those on the path to ordination and providing resources and experiences for clergy enrichment. Picture used from Flikr Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdub1980/8045812334/sizes/c/