Advent Is Here
Sunday, November 30, 2025
It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, not even December yet, and Advent is here. Ack! I’m not ready! I’ve been reading books to calm my anxious questions and put myself in the proper frame of mind, but I still don’t know how to celebrate Christmas when I am so uncertain of what happened and who Jesus was. I’ve been thinking about music since last September, but I still haven’t started practicing or even figuring out how to play what I want. We have an LED advent wreath but no advent readings. This is such an unholy mess for such a holy season.
And yet, isn’t that the point? Last year, I read Honest Advent, which is about how messy the first advent really was. How it must have been a struggle for Mary and Joseph to travel while she was so pregnant, how they had to fight the crowds and find a place to stay in a town already packed to the rafters. How any semblance of a tidy life they had was disrupted by their Roman overlords and vassal king. This was no tastefully lit creche on a manicured suburban lawn—this was difficult, frustrating, discouraging real life.
Of course I’m not ready for Advent—advent is the time of preparation. I am a distractible obsessive, both craving order and unable to order my life. Am I sabotaging myself? Or am I simply a complicated human being, like everyone else? Am I confused or just trying to negotiate real life? I haven’t been able to figure out God and Jesus and the incarnation in almost 64 years—am I really going to figure them out in 3½ weeks?
So, what do I do? I really don’t know, and it would seem silly to wrap this post up in a neat bow after contemplating the messiness of real life. I can’t create a perfect Christmas any better than Clark Griswold or Arthur Read or my own very imperfect extended family. Life is messy, and we celebrate anyway. I’ll be distracted during the Christmas Eve service and rushing to wrap presents on Christmas morning, but maybe I can experience joy and a little peace in the midst of all that chaos. And isn’t that why I have worked so hard to build a contemplative practice? Because that is the way life is every day of the year?