Just this kind of Advent
the one that meets us where we're at, plus Bonhoeffer, and new feature!
This week, a fun new addition! An audio version of this newsletter is available below. For those who would rather listen than read, I’ve included an attempt at something pleasant for your ears. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t sound like I’m dying.
Every night during the month of Advent, my family gathers around a circular set of candles to slowly light the way to Christmas. If you read this, that sentence alone may make you feel sad or frustrated or wistful, wishing that you either had a family to sit with in the evening, or a family that was willing to sit. And so right off the bat I will tell you that like anything we try to do, it is full of flaws and failure. It is far from perfect.
And I will also tell you that there is many a night where my disappointment with these flaws (often just in myself, but often too with those around me) makes me feel like not going through with it. But I force myself to put on a brave face, and despite the lackluster brine that we all bring to the circle, to light the candles anyway and to sit before the One who shines in the darkness, and to ask quietly for the Spirit to work among us.
The thing that is most compelling and evident to me this Advent season, as we go through our anything-but-exemplary evening ritual is the very thing we are rehearsing as we read the Magnificat and sing that wonderful Advent song, O Come, O Come Emmanuel: We are broken. We are a people who need mercy. We are unable to find our way to God, or to each other.
And it is to this kind of moment, to this kind of world, that the Savior comes. He comes to us. Not because we deserve it, or have done all the disciplines in the right way, but because that is what a God who is rich in mercy does. That is what love does.
I think the difficulty in knowing this is that I actually want Him to fix it all right now as well. But this is where Mary is helping me, and where rehearsing her song each day is helping me. Her response to the angel’s upending announcement is complete surrender. Her song, the Magnificat echoes a heart tuned to the work of God not just for her own sake, but for her people and for the world.
I sometimes wonder, could the world we live in today produce a Mary? One so able to rejoice in a blessing that would pierce her own soul so deeply? One able to look down the long road of history and see God’s saving act all through it, even if it didn’t come about in her own exact moment? Perhaps God knew he needed a woman borne of that exact time and circumstance, shaped to tenderly carry and boldly proclaim a mystery most of us still grapple to accept.
But the beautiful grace of the Christmas story is that we inhabit it again and again, year after year, and we can in fact say with Mary, I am yours, Lord. I am your servant. May it be unto me according to your word.
We can inhabit the posture of waiting, the longing for the Light, the joy in His presence, the praise for His mercy, the expectant hope in His return, the faith that all will be made new.
We can also turn from ourselves and become those who offer mercy, who look at others, perhaps especially those who don’t deserve it, and love them anyway.
If you have been reading here for awhile you will know that one of my heroes is Dietrich Bonhoeffer who I often look to at Christmas, as at other times. His writings around Advent, especially during his years in prison before he was killed, hit me like a bucket of cold water again and again each year that I read them. Here is a man who, like Mary, was a seeming pawn in a precarious time in history, but who also like Mary, readily accepted the role he was given.
In a poignant letter to his fiancee, Maria on December 13, 1943 he wrote:
We shall both experience a few dark hours— why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, why we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand…. And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
And so I can light my candles each evening, however weak I may feel them to be, knowing God is in the manger, in the weak gathering of broken people, looking for ways to break in.
Do you know someone who might benefit from reading this? Please share.
It really touched my heart🥹