While I was on my travels, churches all over the world started a new Christian Year with the season of Advent: the Coming.
In many churches the vestments and altar clothes shifted from green to purple. Wreaths popped up here and there with four candles; on each of the four Sundays in Advent another candle will be lit. Manger scenes are being assembled in church basements across the land; court battles are also erupting between groups who want manger scenes on public land and groups who don’t; the writs will be flying across the courthouses like the angels over Bethlehem as battling lawyers move through the choreographed steps of their seasonal dance.
This time of year is rich in religious ritual and meaning. In the rural communities in which most of our ancestors lived not very long ago (my mother can still remember when her family first got electricity and running water), the crops were all gathered in, the fruits of the summer were preserved and laid by, and as the days grew shorter the pace of work slowed. Food was plentiful, folks were resting: it was the time for feasts and and for visits to kinfolk and friends.
There’s a kind of pace to the season that survives despite the urbanization that has cut so many of us off from the land. Halloween, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day remind us of the dead and of what is lost. Thanksgiving is a celebration of what remains, of the families still gathered around us and the memories of those who’ve gone on.
Now the days grow very short, the lights dim, and we turn to paradox: light bursting out in the darkest season of the year, a baby who carries the hopes of a world, the shabby outbuilding attached to an unfashionable hotel in a second class town in a backwater province well off the beaten track of empire — yet somehow that stable becomes the hinge of all fates, the center of all worlds and all times. God becomes Flesh, heaven and earth stand reconciled.
We won’t get to the heart of these paradoxes all at once. That is why we need Advent: for the journey.
It’s a bit like the secular Christmas that runs side by side with the real one. Close to Thanksgiving, the tinsel and toys go up in the stores and the holiday music sounds through the malls — but it’s off-putting. We don’t feel Christmasy, even in that commercial, jingle bells-y way. Buying and giving: it’s a drag, it’s a chore. But then sometime in December, after we’ve been bombarded by enough holiday music and seen enough displays in enough store windows, something clicks. It’s holiday time, and we’re ready to shop.
I’m still a long way from Christmas this year. I’m not ready to shop, much less to contemplate the Word made Flesh. But over the next four weeks that will change. Advent will do its work one more time, and by Christmas Eve I’ll be ready again for the birth.
The glory of the Episcopal Church is — or was, before the well intentioned but aesthetically challenged modernizers and prose-flatteners got their hands on it — the Book of Common Prayer, a 16th and 17th century document that was adopted with a few suitable changes for use here in the United States back in 1789. The glory of the Book of Common Prayer is its collection of ‘collects,’ relatively short prayers to be used at various points during the Christian year. Of the collects, one of the best is the one appointed for the First Sunday in Advent, and then to be repeated every day until Christmas. It was written by Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. His life was not always a particularly edifying one, and he participated in the blood sport of Tudor politics with a bit too much relish. He made up for a lot of that at the end; condemned as a heretic when the Roman Catholic Queen Mary succeeded her brother, he recanted to save his life, thought better of it, and when he was burned at the stake he extended his right hand, the hand that signed the recantation, into the fire to burn first.
Anyway, here is the Advent Collect, something that can help you kindle a bright light in this darkest month of the year. (I’ve kept the original spelling.)
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.
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