Time, even in modernistic, progress-obsessed American culture, is basically cyclical. Clocks, for the most part, are round. Days, weeks, months, years are cycles within cycles within cycles. Whether you’re living by some pagan calendar or not, we’re caught up in these cycles and we demark the degrees of those circles in different ways based on what we value. We can mark it based on our political values (Labor Day, Fourth of July, etc), our economic values (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc), or our philanthropic values (Black history month, AIDs awareness week, etc). And though many Evangelicals might not be familiar with it, there is a corresponding calendar for the Christian life. A peculiar, not very practical, calendar for religious life.
But really this cyclical ordering of our life means we are lent towards the religious way of living anyways. We have routines that are oriented towards the recurrence of the good things and events and experiences we are primarily concerned with. Hygiene is good, so we set out time to shower and brush our teeth. Having money to buy things and services is good, so we have jobs and we work them with a religious commitment. Loving and being loved by people for whom we have affection is good, so we remember their birthdays (Happy up-coming Birthday Mom. I’ll call you on Thursday, I promise) and other important anniversaries. Even Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, those fervently (nay, religiously) anti-religion folks, are engaged in all kinds of religious behavior. They love stuff, so they wrap themselves in the cycles, the patterns that call out in hope of that stuff’s recurrence.
I’m trying to really lean into Advent this year because I’m going to live by some kind of religious, cycloid calendar no matter what. So, I figure it’s a good idea to try to get accustomed to the one that is concerned with the (re)occurrence of the good-est good thing there was, is and ever could be: that God, who’s goodness I appreciate in every good thing, would become a mere man (and yet still God… mind fuck, I know), and submit Himself to the least-good things the world has to offer. Then, with so much love and grace and patience and generosity, He would turn and redeem those least-good things from the filthy, dirty, awful bottom up. He doesn’t obliterate them. He doesn’t triumph by destruction. He triumphs by re-demption. Re-birth.
Everything is new. Again. The religious cycle is itself turned over.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jon,” you say, “but what the hell does Advent have to do with that?”
I’m gonna let Mari answer that one:
“Though Advent leans, aches, aspires toward Christmas, Christmas will not be the be-all-end-all of our year's suffering and fear.
However, Advent will open the doors of hope, and Christmas will charge in, with bells on. Christmas renews our faith that Christ was born, Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Even though Advent technically prepares us for Christmas, it really prepares us for Easter, when Jesus ascends to heaven and assures us his enduring peace. The Christmas story begins in a place called Bethlehem, Bet Lechem, which translates to "House of Bread." And the Christmas story ends during Easter, when Jesus breaks bread for us, then his body.”
I’ll add that Jesus gets born and wrapped in rags in some desert cave full of sheep-shit, and then is buried in some desert cave, wrapped in rags. Its the story of any lowly, refugee life. But then the story starts over. And the world is never the same again. All those lowly things get re-interpreted. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the mourning…
You know. All that religious crazy-talk.
I really do love God, except clumsily and only in a treading-water kind of way. Sometimes I pretend I don't or that I don't want to. And that's pretty too-bad. But I have hope I’m not stuck like this. And I guess that’s why I’m making Advent out to be such a big deal this year. I can’t do much to be more than the barely-not-a-villain that I am, but I can make myself available for a tiny, personal miracle: healthy, blessed, all-the-way humanness. I can wait expectantly to be “Born Again.” Created anew.
(Re)-Incarnation, you might call it.
The gift that keeps on giving, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment