Living into the season of Advent is to live strangely, counterculturally, but wonderfully. Keeping the full season of Advent is strange because around us in CVS and along Lancaster Avenue, Christmas lights and decorations are up. For many, we are entering the “Christmas season.” But we Christians are entering Advent. Advent is also a bit strange vis a vis our culture because it begins a new year—a new Church year, at least. This Sunday, we begin Year A of the three-year lectionary cycle, which is the appointed series of readings for Sunday Masses. In each year of the lectionary cycle, the Gospel readings focus on a particular evangelist for much of the year: Matthew in Year A, Mark in Year B, and Luke in Year C (John is thrown in throughout those years at various times). It’s a gift to journey through the lectionary cycle and hear the good news proclaimed through the particular lenses of the evangelists’ different voices.
I encourage you to be intentional about keeping Advent, not as a defiant churchly stance against “the world,” but as something beneficial for your spiritual lives. Advent is laden with many theological themes: waiting, judgment, eschatology, repentance, and the Incarnation, to name a few. In Advent, we are not only waiting for Christmas and the birth of Christ, but we are waiting for the Second Coming, when as the creeds tell us, Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. During Advent, we attempt to temper our impatience with a patience for a clearer understanding of God’s movement in our lives. We could even say that Advent has an apophatic character, meaning that instead of throwing a bunch of words at God to get him to do something for us, we wait, perhaps in silence, for God’s action. We might more accurately say we wait for an awareness of God’s action among us.
At Good Shepherd, we are intentional about marking the season of Advent and trying to keep it distinct from the Christmas season (which, after all, lasts for twelve days). Vestments and liturgical colors change to violet, the color of kings, as we await the King of kings. We begin the season of Advent with the chanting of the Great Litany in procession at the beginning of Sung Mass, noting that there is a somewhat penitential character to Advent, although it is quite distinct from Lent. This Advent, can the chanting of the Great Litany be for us a way to lament the destruction around us: the mass shootings, the earthquake in Indonesia, the trenchant political divisions, and the lingering illness wrought by a pandemic?
There are also planned events during Advent that can enrich your own spiritual journey this season. On the weekend of December 3-4, the Rev. Professor Sarah Coakley, formerly Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and an Anglican priest, will be with us to to offer an Advent Day of Prayer and Reflection on “The Asceticism of Desire in the Anglican Tradition,” preach at the Sunday Sung Mass, and lead adult formation after Mass. Register here for the day of theological reflection and contemplative prayer, and here for the Sunday adult formation presentation and discussion. And on Sunday, December 11, we will offer a beautiful candlelit service of Advent Lessons and Carols, sung by our choir, at 3 p.m. Please mark your calendars and consider inviting a friend to attend.
Finally, you may wish to engage in some intentional spiritual reading this Advent as we wait on God. There are many books out there designed to aid your journey through this season, but might I offer a few suggestions? Rowan Williams’s Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin is a beautiful theological and pictorial foray through meditating on images of the Incarnation. You might also like to look at some of Sarah Coakley’s works in preparation for her visit to the parish. The New Asceticism is a good place to start. Other important works are God, Sexuality, and the Self , and for the ambitious (!) Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender. And as we enter the “year of Matthew” in our lectionary cycle, perhaps you would like to find a commentary or book that will guide you through a prayerful reading of that Gospel. For those of you who love poetry, I also highly recommend Malcolm Quite’s fantastic book Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.
May this Advent be for all of us a prayerful and intentional season of waiting on Christ’s coming at Christmas, on Christ’s coming at the end of time to judge the living and dead and bring justice to a broken world, and on Christ’s daily coming into our hearts. Let us open our hearts, make room, and let him in.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle