ADVENT

When I was a child Christmas Eve was a particularly strange emotional mixture.  There was the usual overwhelming excitement that came with the thought of presents the next day as well as the magical quality of that night filled with carols, eggnog, and the putting up and decorating of the tree.  But in my somewhat dysfunctional family there were other feelings as well.  My father, a construction worker and an alcoholic, would invariably receive a Christmas bonus from the contractor he was working for and it was usually in cash.  That meant that after work let off early, he would head to some local bar with a few of his co-workers for some “Christmas cheer.”  Sometimes he would arrive home relatively early, in a great mood and a little tipsy.  Other times he would get home late, completely falling-down drunk and in a very volatile state.  We could never know what strange mixture of anger or good cheer or affection or violence would pull into the driveway or when it would come.  And so, amid the wonderful anticipation and magical mood of the holiday also came this agonized waiting to see what the night would really hold.

Those sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrifying nights in my childhood home are the images that invariably come to mind when we sing about “the hopes and fears of all the years” being gathered on Christmas night.  And that is what the season of Advent is all about.  It is not just a time for the ever-growing glow of Christmas celebration to come upon us.  It is not just a time of preparation for the warmth and coziness of our family Christmas customs.  It is far deeper and more ominous than that.  It is much closer to the confusingly mixed mood of my Christmas childhood.

Advent is the season of waiting and hoping.  It is waiting as the world darkens, as the leaves fall, as the coldness comes, as things close down and close in and the year moves toward its ending.  It is a time when the winter that invariably comes surrounds us visibly with the cold and dark and death that we live with invisibly every day and in all seasons.  It reminds us of the whispering fears, the darknesses in us, the echoing chasms where we seem to stand on the edge of all the world’s grief.  It is that dark time in which we do not know what is coming next, but we face it with that mixture-- hope and dread striving within us.  As the Advent song has it, “Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are.”  Or as another Advent carol has it, “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand.”

The particular spirit of this anticipatory season is that we look to the future.  We acknowledge the uncertainty.  We do not know what is coming but we know that the future holds our own deaths and the deaths of everything and everyone that we love.  It is so telling that when old Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas yet to come, that ghost is the embodiment of the grim reaper and leaves him trembling in terror.  The spiritual challenge is to look courageously and unflinchingly into the growing cold and darkness, and to see there not just the endings but the coming of the presence of God.  The challenge is to find the source and fuel for a hope that is stronger and deeper than the dread and despair that is at the heart of life.  Advent means “coming.”  We believe that even in the midst of death and decay and destruction, what is coming is the love and grace and joy of God.  That is not an easy hope to affirm against all the odds of what we think we know, but that is the real locus of faith.

Most of the time, faced with the hard realities of the future as we age (and age) and the constant trickle of the sand through the hour-glass of our lives, we just change the subject.  We seek diversion or entertainment or things that keep us otherwise occupied.  Dostoyevsky once said that our whole lives are mostly spent finding ways to look away from what lies before us.  The Advent season is when we open our eyes, look straight ahead, struggle with our fear and choose.  We choose how we want to face it.  Do we choose dread and fear or do we choose hope?  Do we choose to avoid the subject or do we face it with the stunning affirmation of our faith that the future belongs to God’s love?  Advent is about finding that hope and standing on the tip-toes of expectation, waiting to drink deeply from a future laced with grace, spiked with love, and brimming over with the joy of God’s coming again and again among us.  That future holds the miracle of incarnation, the birth of light and life, the glow of grace born right here in the darkness.

All these years later, while I remember some scary and ugly times when my father came home late on Christmas Eve, mostly I remember the joys.  I remember his half-drunken crooning of “White Christmas.”  I remember him holding me up over his head so I could put the star on the top of the tree.  I remember the hugs that came so seldom on other nights of the year.  I remember joys.  And so I know that hope is the name of the season.

Scared and Loving It

Halloween is here.  There was a time when Halloween seemed like a fairly minor event, but recently, more and more people put out lavish decorations, orange lights, ghosts and goblins on their lawns, and strange things hanging from their trees.  It is beginning to rival Christmas in its visibility in the neighborhood.  Here at the church, of course, it has also become a major holiday because of the Senior PF Haunted House.  The size, ambition, and scariness of this annual extravaganza have grown each year since its inception some ten years ago.  Each year, I am amazed by how involved, excited, and committed our kids are in making this an extraordinary event.  They seem to love this stuff; putting on makeup that makes them look like zombies, wearing truly creepy costumes, and hiding in dark places ready to terrify passers-by. 

What is the powerful appeal of all of this?  I think it is that Halloween always seems just a little magical.  There is a temporary suspension of all of the usual rules of reality.  The nights are filled with mysteries.  We behave as if witches and zombies were real.  Nothing is what it seems.  Surprises lurk behind every bush or around every corner of a darkened church hallway.  The night seems alive.  And one of the mysteries is oneself, behind the mask or the make-up or the costume.

I feel like we occasionally need the opportunity (especially we adults) to suspend our usual sense of reality.  The world often loses much of its excitement and mystery in the minds of sober, rational, practical people like ourselves.  I think a big part of us longs for a world where anything can happen; where things are not so predictable; where there are a host of things unseen and things are not always what they seem.  That sort of world is frightening, but that is part of its fascination.  Of course, the real world is pretty much that way, but we have worked hard to tame our little part of it.  We are conditioned to see only what we expect to see.  We have rational explanations for everything.  We have tried to domesticate our environment to make it maximally useful and minimally frightening.  But that also makes it poorer and a little more boring.

I’m not going to suggest, of course, that we return to a belief in witches and demons (even though the notion has some appeal), but perhaps we can find more ways to marvel at what we don’t know (which is most things) rather than reducing our notion of reality to what we do know.

One of the reasons why children on Halloween night or during the haunted house can deal with their fears, and even enjoy them a little bit, is that they are disguised (hiding behind masks or make-up).  A mask can be a very freeing thing.  It’s not just something that hides your identity.  You fear less because, in some way, behind the mask, you are not really you.  You can behave in ways that you would never dare otherwise, because the mask can take on a life of its own and draw you out of your own restrictions and fears and inhibitions.  You can “try on” another you.  I’ve seen totally shy and quiet kids behave in amazingly bold and assertive ways while roaming the church hallways as a zombie, not seeming like the kids that I knew at all.

We adults tend to get locked into the identity that we have chosen.  We burden ourselves with the need to be consistent.  We can only be how we think we are, as if that where only one thing or as if we really knew what that was.  And so we lock away so many of the surprising and unpredictable elements in ourselves.

Maybe we all need a little dose of Halloween in our lives; some sense of unreality; some more room for the mysterious in us and around us to break through.  For the fact is that God is most alive in all of those unpredictable, surprising parts of our world and of ourselves that we have so often shut out or explained away.  Finding God may well depend on our being able to experience mysteries rather than explain them.

So come to the Haunted House or take a walk on Halloween night (or any night).  Allow your imagination to see a world again that is alive with things unseen and where everyone or everything is not just what they appear to be.  Let yourself feel the presence of some of those parts of reality that we usually choose not to acknowledge.  God is there.