Today is the first Sunday of Advent. After three more, it’ll be time for Christmas. On each Sunday we church folk light a new candle tied to a spiritual pillar that helps focus on the coming celebration of the birth of Jesus — hope, peace, joy and love. This is a gross simplification of course, but this isn’t a liturgical encyclopedia.
That the season tends to mean different things to different people goes without saying — not even counting the folks who don’t bother with the religious trappings of the holiday — but also it tends to mean different things to the same people depending on their particular circumstances when the December arrives.
Many people (churched or otherwise) struggle to find joy in Advent and Christmas if they’re feeling the sting of a personal loss, and there’s often no expiration date on that kind of challenge. I’ve walked that road, but more so remember the years when everyday life didn’t allow for planning to do anything besides get through the next day as best as possible, or when something like a major career or housing decision loomed early in the new year, so everything Yuletide was engaged with a façade of continuity.
No matter how hardened my heart might be in a given December, it usually cracks wide open with the first few notes of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” on Christmas Eve. If not, then surely by the time the soprano descant kicks in on the back end. My brain knows all the words to all the verses, but good luck getting my mouth to make a sound. I tend to just stand there letting the emotion wash over, understanding that while arguably the whole reaction is just some chemical equation of synapses firing, that I’m not there for understanding, I’m there to feel the feelings that connect me to something greater than myself. I had the same kind of sensation at the Grand Canyon, atop Pike’s Peak, in a low-flying airplane over the vastness of Montana, during my wedding, in the delivery room…
I’m rambling. The point is to say my mind has gone a lot of different places with respect to faith or religion or church or spirituality or whatever you’d care to call it, but always there’s been the belief that life isn’t an accident, and even if it were, the simple gift of being able to experience the universe should be an invitation to live in gratitude and do whatever is in my power to make sure other beings consider their existence a blessing as well.
And the point of saying that is to explain a leading reason the approaching Advent and Christmas season hasn’t been flipping my switch this year is because I have nearly exhausted my tolerance for people who use their religious affiliation as a political weapon. It’s not why I’ve ever gone to any church and I very much dislike even the thought of being complicit in such conduct, even if I don’t feel that’s what’s happening with my chosen congregation.
We’re supposed to keep things positive here, and I’m pivoting back that direction, but it all had to be said because none of what follows is terribly useful absent the context of Advent. Because today is the first Sunday of Advent and because one of the kids was singing in one of our worship services we sat in that particular room and it was decorated almost exactly as it was two Decembers ago when a different kid was singing in the same room and after he went off to Sunday school and I kind of wandered on the periphery I saw in my internal viewfinder an image I wanted to capture for posterity, and then I used my phone to make that happen.
It’s not the greatest picture I’ve ever taken — surely I could have done better with my DSLR and far less concern about people watching me taking snapshots in the middle of a church service — but as I’ve been thinking about this website and doing deeper dives on the idea of favorite it struck me that maybe I should use some time to look backward and think about why certain images I fashioned still resonate in my memory. And as I sat there this morning, in the same place inspiration struck for my last significant personal writing endeavor, with the room looking very much the same as it did last December and the one before that and probably a decade of Decembers or more, I ultimately decided I should write a little something, even if the underlying truth is the picture means what it means to me not as its own piece of art or as a single moment in time but because it represents all the other moments in time where everything looked the same but for all the people and the things they carried in their hearts and minds into the sacred place to be together for something bigger than the individual or the collective.
A few weeks ago I ordered a large size print of this image and had it sent to the home of the woman who is standing at the pulpit preaching an Advent sermon because she recently retired from our church and I thought it would be a nice gesture. The photo printing website shipped it directly to her home and I was going to send a written card or an email or a thank you note or something to provide context, but of course I forgot to do so and now it’s days and days too late and I feel rather silly for having this triangular box sent to her house without the slightest hint of where or why or how.
But also, that note might not have amounted to much more than “thank you for working at our church, my family was blessed to know you, here’s a pictured I took a few years ago when I should have been inside listening, I hope it gives you a happy memory of your time here.” And that may have been enough at the time, but now, in Advent again, I realize it was about a whole lot more.
Today we lit the candle of hope. Next week we’re doing the same for peace, and the longer I live the more I want this world to embrace a peace that passes understanding and strive to accept whatever role I might play in that process. So I’m going to spend some time looking at this picture and maybe you will, too. And you can think about hope and peace, or joy or love or whatever you want, really. Maybe you're not a church person or a faith person or a spiritual person, but chances are you’ve got some sort of tradition in your life that takes your mind out of the ordinary, if even for a moment, and shifts the focus on something grander than whatever the eye can see or the ear can hear.
I don’t go to church for answers, but I do go because life is full of questions and it’s OK to just think and talk about them and see where that process leads. And sometimes I go because I want to sit in a room and sing a song and feel connected. Loved. Calm. Sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes it does. Christmas is coming. I hope to be ready. Today was a good step.