Ripening with Advent this year...

Yesterday, as the snows came to this little section of the valley, I sat sipping hot chocolate and talking with my spiritual friend/advisor about Advent. He said that over the years he's given up on the Advent lectionary - all this talk about waiting, waiting, waiting - so this year's he's preaching a series about how God's holy family both challenges and strengthens our earthly families.

Part of me gets his willingness to move beyond the confines of the lectionary from time to time; after all, this year I'm playing with ideas of Mary for Protestants this year in ways that are not a part of the standard readings (although I have discovered them a jumping off point.) But another part thinks: "I'll NEVER learn enough about waiting and patience to toss these readings away." I want to believe I've matured and ripened in this Advent waiting business - and maybe I have a little - but mostly I'm not so sure. Gertrud Mueller-Nelson writes:

Men have a rather more difficult time "being pregnant" than women. But they aren't exempt. The dark feminine ferment of the season affects them, too, and they can find it difficult to be at ease with so much feminine feeling in the air. Their discomfort might show up in moods and withdrawal or feeling as they are being pressured into production. Patience helps. Relationships become rich and rewarding if a man will risk describing his feelings and talking them out. In that way he honors his forgotten feminine side and his inner feminine will deal kindly with him and not bring him into a mood.... Remember, religion is not an intellectual concept: it is a deeply felt and utterly human experience.

I have to learn how to wait - so I practice putting up lights and decorating the tree and even baking bread (which besides music is my all-time favorite spiritual discipline!) and I find myself yearning for the words of the scriptures:

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for God has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. The Lord has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as God spoke through the mouth of the holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered the holy covenant, the oath that sworn to our ancestor Abraham and Sarah, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness before the Lord all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare God's ways, to give knowledge of salvation to the people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

It is rather like my favorite songs of this season: "Comfort, comfort o my people," "O come, o come Emmanuel" and especially "In the bleak midwinter." Sarah McLachlan captures this spirit nicely in her "Wintersong."

They give me permission to be incomplete... in formation... still searching and sometimes orphan like, too. In addition to this being the second Sunday of Advent it is also St. Nicholas day - one of my all time favorites - of which Mueller-Nelson writes: "Our Santa Claus is a valuable mythic image, but he is often distorted into a father image without dignity or authority or mystery."

She then explores the pathetic, patronizing figure Santa has become - a vulgar father figure who teaches us to beg for what we want - rather than the generous and healing male who shows us the value of being a gift-bearer: "He never expected a return for his good deeds. That very selfless giving is a big part of our being parents. We know, in the urgency of doing what is right for our children, that our ego does not often get the credit... and so Nicholas teaches us how to give so "that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing."

And so the search and wandering in the wilderness of Advent continues.