Tag Archives: Advent

A nod to “End of year”

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by in Advent, Audre, Faith

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

,

End of year is a lovely article written by Jessica Hoff. It prompted me to share my own thoughts on the subject.

I have always considered Advent to be that time to prepare for Him a room. There was no room at the inn but there’s room in a heart. I walk into the room of my heart and look around and I’m not pleased. I go fetch my cleaning supplies and return to face the room.

I notice the cobwebs; I’ve not used this room to its full advantage and so it has gotten dusty. I didn’t praise Him enough. I didn’t pray to Him enough. I didn’t share my joy in Him enough so now all this dust and cobwebs. I sweep and vacuum and make sure I get into all the dark corners. I make sure I keep my eyes wide open so I can see everything in the dark corners. Where the Light is, there can be no dark corners.

I scrub mop the floor. It seems that every foulness I have occasioned is spilled over and floor bears every stain. It’s back-breaking work; I toss out the murky water as many times as it takes til the floor is so clean it is squeaky and shining.

I take special care in cleaning the windows. No streaks allowed! I don’t stop polishing the glass until it is sparkling. This is very important to me because they sparkle and glisten in the Son and will be seen by Him and everyone who looks in my windows will see Him.

Just about Christmas Eve, the room is prepared for Him. Clean, shiny, sweet smelling. The candles are lit and flicker playfully. There are no dark corners, the muck of another year has been removed and the room and I wait. I am ready to receive my Lord.

Waiting for the man

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Faith

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, ,

baby-jesus-mary-joseph

We’re now well into the second part of Advent. One of the sadnesses of our secular society is everyone’s saying ‘happy Christmas’ and yet that is still to come. I don’t want to be the Grinch that stole Christmas, but do think we’re missing something if we don’t celebrate Advent properly. It is a time of waiting.

I think back to those who wait. What must it have been like for Our Beloved Mother. Oh how my heart goes out to her! Because we love her so much, it’s easy to forget she was just a young Jewish girl having a baby. She’d already had the problem of explaining all that to Joseph – and until the angel revealed the truth in the dream, he’d thought of putting her away. Our society is so free and easy in these matters it is hard for it to understand how it was for that young girl, pregnant, and not by her betrothed. There would have been sniggers and gossip – we know that there were rumours about her having been raped by a Roman soldier- this would have been really horrid for a pure young woman. I don’t know we can recapture how hard it was for her – and we should love her all the more for going through this for us. Now she was simply waiting.

I say ‘simply’, but what could have been simple about knowing your baby was the promised Messiah. Bosco is a dear, but sometimes he’s a bit of a silly. Of course Mary (or Miriam) accepted her fate – God gives us all free-will. But it was a long journey and she must have been tired – she was near her time, and like all first-time pregnant women, she’d have been worried. But by this time she could nothing but wait.

We wait with her. We know what happened, we know the story so well, but if we use our imagination, we can put ourselves into that first Advent. The Church does it through the ‘O Antiphons’ We sing them at Vespers – they never mention Jesus by name, but they speak eloquently of his attributes as ‘the root’ as ‘the word’ as ‘wisdom’ and, finally, as the longed-for Saviour of the world. How wise the Church is. It knew not to spoil the anticipation – it makes us wait, as Our Lady waited, as the unknowing world waited – until, on the midnight clear, the Angelic host proclaimed that Christ was born in Bethlehem. The Word who had breathed the world into existence, became a suckling babe at his mother’s breast.

For that moment, God was made man and dwelt among us – and the Light came into the World and the World knew him not. But his mother did. So let us be with her now in this last week, awaiting the Son of Man, and let us be thankful to her, because she took on herself the mission she was given. Every women will know what it means to want to be a mother, and how you want only the best for your child. But Our beloved mother Mary was waiting for the Saviour of the World. Let us, too, wait for the Man of Sorrows who took away the sins of the world.

 

 

Advent and Commercialization

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Advent, Christmas, Church/State, Faith

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, ,

Second Advent Week

Second Advent Week (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last Tuesday in his post Advent and Us, Chalcedon made this point.

Advent is a casualty of the secularisation of our society. For many people its arrival seems to have been marked by the urge to worship Mammon; at the garage this morning, paying for the petrol took longer than usual, apparently because so many people were using their debit and credit cards for ‘cyber Monday’. Already the invitations for Christmas parties are here, and the general thrust of the season seems to be towards excess and self-gratification; that may not, of course, be much more than an intensification of business as normal. So how do we retrieve Advent?

He’s correct of course. But there is also this. Advent/Christmas has been sort of a pendulum in our society. When I wrote about Thanksgiving, I was reminded that for the Separatist/Pilgrims Christmas was simply another work day, not celebrated at all. I doubt any of us really want to go back to that either.

The other point to that is that business, at its best is agnostic in regards to religion. It’s purpose is to supply the goods you want at what you consider a fair price. Yes, the owner of a business should have the option of not dealing with anyone he chooses not to. But he must understand that such a course works to his disadvantage as well as those with whom he chooses not to deal. That does not mean it is never justified.

But retail is a very strange business. the way it has developed in the US (and I suspect the UK), it has become a very large friendly dog, in a very small room, and every time it wags its tail it knocks something off the table.

Here we have a business that (if it is lucky) manages to break even in the first eleven months of the year. That means if it is to make a profit at all, it must do so in the last month, and we all know that coincides with Advent/Christmas. Christmas is, of course, a marketer’s dream: The birth of a child (and so a birthday party) combined with the major religious holiday of the dominant religion, in our countries.

And so, if you were in charge of a business like that, what would you do? I think most of us would do exactly as our retailers do, exploit it for all we are worth, after all we have employees to pay, and presumably we’d like to keep them employed for another year.

Yes, much of it is completely tasteless, occasionally degrading, and completely misses our point. And that part of it bothers me as well but, some isn’t.

And never doubt that if they could figure out a way to exploit Ramadan, they would screw that up as completely. Their job is to move product, not be be sympathetic to the religious.

Mostly, I suspect we should take this as still another reminder that while we are in this world, we are not really of this world.

And besides, a fair amount of it is kind of fun, when we put our outrage aside, isn’t it?

And personally I have always believed God has a good sense of humor, He must have, He created us, after all.