This year Thanksgiving weekend is also the start of Advent, and Advent, the start of a new liturgical year in the Christian calendar. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy new year!
Once again, we begin the cycle of the church year that flows from the birth of a child to His self-emptying sacrifice and resurrection, and on to the mission-fired Spirit of Pentecost.
Why, in that case, do we treat this season as a prolonged child’s holiday? That’s okay, I guess, to a point. It is a joy to see the world through kids’ eyes. But if we allow our vision to get stuck amidst the “ho, ho, hos” and the baubles and bells, we miss a profound opportunity for feeding our souls what they really crave: a deepening, mature connection with the Divine.
Early this month I walked into a store looking for purple pillar candles for our Advent wreath and was visually assaulted by Christmas greens, reds, golds—and the overwhelming scent of artificial pine. Not a purple thing in sight.
In that moment, weeks before Thanksgiving, something in my soul was already recoiling from the jingle bells and plastic bows and glitzy tack. Something similar happens to me as December’s holiday parties and merry-making pile up. For a while I enjoy sugary treats. But before too long my body craves real food. You know: green vegetables, lentil soup, lean protein.
Just so, for some reason this year especially, I crave a healthy entrance to the Advent season without caving to the commercial holiday, without allowing it to overwhelm what my spirit seeks.
How about you?
Just when I needed him, Zacchaeus appeared. This diminutive tax collector of Jericho, full of longing for something he couldn’t quite name, climbed a tree where Jesus spotted him. Perhaps then, for the first time in his life, Zacchaeus felt truly seen. Jesus’ mandate is firm and direct, leaving him no opportunity to demur: “Zacchaeus come down, today I must stay at your house.”
I’d guess these words landed on Zacchaeus’ soul like fresh vegetables or steamy lentil soup: rich, nourishing, fulfilling the deepest longings of his heart. They must have. Because Zacchaeus found himself immediately compelled to generosity beyond everyone’s expectations – very much like Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge.
In Zacchaeus’ experience I find a key to my Advent practice: Watching for Jesus, who is searching for me. Where to look?
In Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister’s book about the liturgical cycle, I gravitated to her description of a new church season, which starts with Advent, as “an adventure in human growth.”
These words, advent and adventure, have the same root which means to come or to go, to anticipate or to risk; to lose something.
You may already make time annually on a specific date – New Year’s, your birthday or an important anniversary – to reflect on how you’ve grown or changed throughout the year. What has transpired? A job change? A new person on the family tree? A grief endured? A surprising joy? Each experience transforms you. Advent is another good time to take stock.
Robert Cording’s poem Advent Stanzas might help:
Are we always creating you, as Rilke said, / Trying on our best days, / To make possible your coming-into-existence?
… Each year you are born again. It is no remedy / For what we go on doing to each other, / For history’s blind repetitions of hate and reprisal.
Here I am again, huddled in hope. He continues. For what / Do I wait?
Huddled in hope … an Irish theologian, John Power, once wrote: “Hope is the Christian way to wait; hope is waiting made holy.” Thus, he rendered waiting synonymous with hope.
So how would you dare to answer Cording’s question? For what do you wait? For what do you hope? For what nourishing food do you long? For what shift in your relationship with the Divine?
How will Advent mature you this year? How will you give yourself over to the season, pay attention, and learn? Is there some small change you can make to help immerse you into God’s desire for you this season?
Do you need to lean into liturgy? Or pray with the Sunday scriptures? Do you want to be intentional about hearing the deeper meanings in the hymns of the season? What about volunteering or simplifying your gift-giving?
If you give it some attention, you’ll be able to discern some way to keep yourself alert to the joyful transformation God wants to work in your life.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is the communication director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield.
