Advent. Humble

I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve got so much to be humble about! To begin with, I ended that sentence with a preposition and my 7^th-grade English teacher did one more turn in his grave. Sorry, Mr. Gentry.

God, on the other, would not seem to have much about which to be humble. All of the world’s great theistic traditions posit a God who is, well, great. So for God to choose to be known in and through the life of a baby born to an unwed mother in a backwater town in an outpost of an empire whose leader claimed divine status for himself was surely an exercise in humility.

If we understood this it would turn our lives upside down.

Advent is a perfectly awful time to reflect on this because we have no time to understand anything other than the imperatives of the season: get the shopping done; deck the damn halls; plan ten special events at church; line up travel; get Christmas cards out. The lists just get longer and longer as the days get shorter.

I don’t mean to brag, but I have too much to do to take on humility as a spiritual practice. Hm, there might just be something wrong with that.

Advent. Time

It’s but a stream I go a-fishin’ in, as Thoreau put it, but what is time, really? The meaning of being? That’s what Heidegger thought. Part of a continuum with space, according to relativity. That thing I waste too much of. That thing that gets shorter every day as I grow older and closer to the end of my experience of it. That container for the presence of God.

I’m not sure what time is, but I know that today it’s passed swiftly and disjointedly by as construction activity swirls around – and through – my study at Burke. On the drive in this morning I heard a snippet of a story on the radio about the emerging market for devices that connect to our brains. A critic questioned the wisdom of such technology when existing tech has led to an average attention span of about 40 seconds when browsing the web. The information technology that has become ubiquitous in our lives over the past 20 years has effected the way we process the world, and constant distraction is one recognized result.

If we are constantly distracted what are we missing? Suffering the the opportunities to bring comfort? Injustice and the opportunities to address it? Challenge and controversy and the opportunities to engage them?

Perhaps that’s part of why I chose the decidedly unwise practice of writing each day this Advent. For at least as long as it takes to write a short blog post I am focusing just on putting some words on screen. It may not be much, but at least it's focused for some time.

It would probably be a deeper practice if I wrote these ponderings by hand. It would certainly be deeper if, instead of blog jottings, I picked up pen and paper and wrote verse. But I really don’t have time to do that every day during Advent when the church is under construction, literally, and we’re trying to hire new staff and I’m a long, long way from know my way in this new time.

Time, then, is the thing I don’t have enough of, but what I have is rich and full. So, I’ll take the time to pause, look out on a beautiful sunny winter day, and give thanks.

Advent. Visit

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The Advent story in scripture is mostly about visits. In Matthew the angel visits Joseph to reassure him about Mary’s child. In Luke the angel comes to Zechariah to tell him about Elizabeth’s child. Then it’s off to see Mary to let her know her part in God’s purposes. Then Mary goes to visit Elizabeth.

There’s lot of visiting.

In churchy settings we use the word “visitation” to describe encounters with the divine and thus bracket these events off from ordinary life.

That’s a shame. What if, instead of extraordinary, we thought of encounters with the divine as part of everyday life? What if we walked through life expected to encounter the holy?

My Monday has included a series of visits, and none of them felt like a “visitation” in the moment. Yet, that’s more about the way I’ve moved through the day than the way God has moved through it.

That is to say, I think there have been a few holy moments in this perfectly ordinary day that began with a visit to my neighborhood coffee shop on the way to the DMV.

There was nothing holy about the DMV except perhaps for the way that entering a circle of hell gives one appreciation for almost any other place one could visit.

But the stop at the coffee shop was, while perfectly ordinary, full of grace embodied in the two baristas, Claudia and Maria, who greeted me this morning. People who bring joy and light to perfectly ordinary encounters point to the common light from which we all spring forth. It’s all too easy to forget that and take it for granted, but I’m pretty sure my trip to the coffee shop was a visitation.