Anyone who grew up in an even remotely liturgical church community has heard of Advent. The rest of us have seen Advent calendars, with tiny doors concealing tinier candies. And anyone who has seen Christmas Vacation knows Advent is when Clark Griswold spreads mayhem and puts up far too many Christmas lights.

What is Advent? It is the liturgical season which begins the church year and when we prepare for Christmas. It runs from the first Sunday in December through sundown on Christmas Eve, when the season of Christmastide officially begins. The purpose of Advent is prepare for the coming of God into the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but we are forever rushing Mary to push that baby out so we can open our presents. Instead, we need to push back against the holiday rush and make time to meditate on the mystery and gift of the Incarnation. Our cultural ADD makes it a struggle to “treasure all those words and ponder them in our hearts.” And there is a lot to ponder.

Imagine how you would react to an archangel appearing in front of you—the first thing they always say is, “fear not.” Zechariah gets trashed because he doubted Gabriel and was struck deaf and speechless while waiting for the birth of his son, John, but Mary struggled with the angelic annunciation as well, and, let’s be honest, we would have too.

Luke 1:11-13, 18-20 NRSV Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. . . . Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

Luke 1:28-30, 34 NRSV And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God . . . Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

And after Jesus birth, she still had a lot to think about:

Luke 2:15-19 NRSV When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

My takeaway is that the idea of almighty God coming to earth as one of us (Immanuel) is disturbing and frightening and hard to understand. We’ve domesticated it with familiar stories and cozy manger scenes, but it’s still hard to get your head around. God is depicted as loving and gentle in the Hebrew scriptures but also as mighty and holy—the sort of holy that could get you killed if you came too close.

We might ask along with Mary, how can a transcendent, eternal God become a (human) creature in the world that they made? That seems hopelessly self referential (the creator becoming created), and if I’ve learned anything about logic, that’s bound to create a paradox. A self existent creator cannot be created. A first cause cannot be caused.

What is incarnation? Contemporary science argues that our physical body is integral to our consciousness—our thoughts are expressions of biological processes, and mind can’t be separated from body. Even in the first century, various cultures and schools of thought disagreed on the nature of the soul and whether it could exist apart from the body. There were notions of a life force common to all creatures as opposed to consciousness and intelligence or to an eternal soul. What makes us alive? What is the essence of who we are? The incarnation was a puzzler—if it was difficult to speak of spirit and body, then what of a divine spirit and an earthly body? Incarnation came to be understood by the majority as the perfect melding of God and humanity—the hypostatic union, to be exact. Jesus had two natures that were one nature, distinct and yet inseparable. Still, finding words to describe it is an exercise in oxymoron. It’s a bundle of paradoxes tied up in red Christmas ribbons.

So what is this scriptural bundle telling us? That still isn’t settled, but we don’t need to nail down the specifics of our Christology to appreciate its grace and mystery.

• The incarnation is God entering all the messiness of human life. God had poopy pants and zits. God had embarrassing erections.
• God had crappy days and somehow maintained divine perfection. Maybe it’s not sinful to feel bummed out.
• God understands when we have crappy days. God doesn’t say, “oh, that must feel bad”; God says, “I’ve been there too.”

Still, I have lots of questions:

• It seems awfully Epicurean to insist on God being purely spirit and existentially distant from humanity. Is that why the Incarnation was such a shocking idea? That Jesus was Emmanuel, God With Us?
• Does spirit simply mean immaterial? Outside of creation? Transcendent?
• Can God have existence without physicality?
• If we are made in the image of an immaterial God, then how can we be physical beings?
• If God is transcendent, how can we be made in his image?
• How could an immaterial God create a material universe?
• What is kenosis? What was Jesus' emptying himself of to become one of us?
• Is the incarnation a factual description or a metaphor?
• If the incarnation is a metaphor, what is it a metaphor for?

What is a soul?

• Does our soul develop as we mature?
• Was Jesus God at conception?
• Could the infant or prenatal Jesus have been God if his soul didn’t yet exist?
• Did Jesus know he was God as a child? Those would have been truly terrible twos.
• Can we have a soul without consciousness?
• What is the essence of God?
• What kind of language can even express this stuff?

I don’t know, and perhaps it is better to have good questions than certain answers. That’s what I’ll be pondering this advent.

What do I want?

Seriously. What do I want from God?

Let me take a step back. The question of what I want arises from losing any certainty about God and faith. I know what I was taught, but my assurance that what I was taught was true was vaporized in the implosion of American Evangelicalism and its nearly unanimous support for a troop of horribly behaved goons led by Donald Trump. I still believe there is a God, and I believe that God does not endorse coarse, philandering bullies as leadership material. I also know the language of Christianity and can use it to describe God, but I am no longer certain of specifics or the theological claims that I was raised with.

And if I ask, what do I want, it seems fair to ask, what do I need? That complicates the question. What is reasonable? What is likely? Would what I want be helpful in the long run? Or would granting my wish come with all sorts of unanticipated drawbacks? Humans, especially conservative humans, long for certainty in the worst way, and they often create it where it is not warranted, which, in a nutshell, describes the development of fundamentalisms of all sorts. Intellectual humility pushes back gently but is largely ignored by the masses. I don’t mean to be elitist, just to say that living with uncertainty is hard.

So . . . I believe God exists, but I can’t be sure of more than that. I hope and gravitate toward the idea that God is good—while there is much that is evil in the world, I don’t see how the good and kind could exist without an eternal paradigm—but many days I have my doubts.

I often feel a deep, existential loneliness. Human relationships are good and a gift, but they are temporary and often fickle. It seems that a relationship with an eternal, self existent God would be dependable beyond the limits of humanity, except that I too am temporal and often fickle. Is an eternally dependable relationship possible, or am I too looking for certainty that doesn’t exist?

Would I be happy, even temporarily, with an experience of God, something I could feel and touch. We like to picture ourselves as rational beings, but that isn’t what sustains us—we need to feel loved. I can have all kinds of good ideas about God, but what I really want is a hug.

Christmas used to fill me with warm fuzzy feelings—it was a special time that we celebrated together; it brought the promise of time together as family, of gifts and good food, of time away from the workaday, when we could enjoy each other and relax. We celebrated the presence of God With Us in a naive assurance that it was all true and all would be well. Now I feel a nostalgic ache for those times I remember but cannot reclaim. I don’t want to be cynical, but I’ve seen too much of life to believe that all can ever be well. A lot can be well, and all can be well for a short time, but sadness, hurt, and loneliness always return. It really does seem to be existential, and we need to learn to embrace the good knowing it will all will eventually end.

Am I looking for a temporal connection to an eternal and good God? Or an eternal relationship in some kind of post-death existence? I don’t know. Either sounds good; each has its drawbacks. Temporal relationships end, and eternal ones I can’t wrap my head around. Projecting my current existence eternally is, frankly, exhausting and frightening—a wearying existence with no hope of escape. It makes one feel for Sisyphus—why does he continue to push that rock unless there is no alternative? I’m left hoping for an eternal existence that I can’t currently understand and having to trust the goodness of God to make it good. Or that my existence will end peacefully and that I will be able to enjoy what I have while it lasts.

Do I want certainty again? Probably. Perhaps what I want is certainty and what I need is to accept uncertainty. Can I trust God enough to eventually make all things well that I can live in an unwell world with hope? I long for love and friendship and even more so for love and friendship with an eternal God. I want a sign that God exists. Jesus often spoke of signs and of the people’s blindness to them—am I asking for a sign that will not come? Am I being stubborn and not believing the signs I’ve been given? It seems to come down to what I can make myself trust, if I can make myself trust anything.

My initial, glib, answer was for God to become known. For me to have some kind of relationship with God that felt familiar. Or that felt like anything. I can barely feel close to people I can touch and see, much less a transcendent God. For God to become known would be for the transcendent to become present in the material word, perhaps immanent, maybe even incarnate. I think that’s why Christmas and the incarnation hold such fascination for me—I am longing for God to be present in my life.

It seems like an undeniable encounter with God would be really nice, but could I coast through the rest of my life on that? Am I being realistic or cynical? Or hopeless? I honestly don’t know. Would I need to coast through the rest of my life, or could I just enjoy the experience while it lasted? Anything that could carry me through the rest of my life would seem very likely to involve certainty, so maybe I need to keep renewing my experience to charge my batteries for another bit. Maybe that’s the essence. Maybe that’s why we have weekly services and annual holidays—we can’t go forever on just one charge. We need to keep breathing, to keep eating, to keep encountering God, even if it doesn’t feel we’re encountering anything. Maybe just going through the motions is all we can do some days, even most days. There will always be a post-holiday letdown, we’ll always have to return to ordinary time, but we can always look forward to next week and next year, when we do it all over again.

Life feels spectacularly ordinary right now, and yet I still long for Christmas. That old hope won’t go away—hope that God will be with us. Is that enough? Maybe it has to be, at least for now.