Your Soul Needs Advent This Christmas Season
The Christmas story begins with darkness--metaphorical and physical. The first sign of Jesus' birth is a great light. The sign of Jesus' birth could have been anything and yet God chose a star.
Darkness and light. Both are a part of the Advent and Christmas season.
Advent is a rhythm of the church calendar that matches the seasons of the earth, for those in the northern hemisphere at least. Late autumn is the end of the growing season. The harvest is brought in; the anxiety of whether there will be a harvest or not is over; and it becomes feast time. The long days of field work are over too. Double feast time!
While it is feast time (apples and apple cider donuts!), the night sky is getting darker and darker, earlier and earlier and colder and colder. There is feasting but there is also anxiousness because the world is turning dark. Will the cold devour them? Will the food last? Will the darkness take something?
In the growing darkness we subconsciously ask, “Will the sun return again to grow life?” Thankfully we now know that December 21st is the winter solstice. We know that the sun will return again, a little bit more and more each day.
Feasting and fear. Joy and pain. Light and dark. We get both.
Here is where the Christmas season falls—with lots of Christmas lights. And lots of distractions and noise and too much money spent. This is the opposite of the rhythm. Is this all a coping mechanism to get through the dark?
Between the feasting and the winter solstice we have Advent. The church calendar part that recognizes the waiting in the darkness because the Light is coming. A new beginning is coming. Advent is adventus or coming.
Advent on the church calendar is when light and life is fading so we set aside four weeks to focus on the waiting and the darkness to remember that in the waiting and in the darkness God is still at work. So we light candles of hope, peace, joy, and love.
Advent is a Christmas tradition moving in step with creation. Like nature, we hibernate inward to find this Larger Story God. (While still attending Christmas parties.)
In the beautiful chaos of Christmas, our soul needs Advent.
Question for Reflection:
- In the beautiful and memory-filled chaos of Christmas, can you make time for Advent? For some sort of Advent practice? To recognize the feasting and fear, the joy and pain, the light and dark, and the waiting?
