Advent, First Sunday

O come, o come, Emmanuel… and ransom captive Israel

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the son of god appear...

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come for thee, o Israel...

My faith has met many challenges and seen quite a bit of evolution in recent years. There's a decently sized list of things I've "known" and been sure of most of my life that I'm no longer assured in. But one of the things I am sure of is that the Advent and Christmas stories resonate very, very deeply with me. No matter what ideas I feel led to hold a little more loosely, I imagine it will always be the case that what Christmas represents in the story of humankind and our Creator will be something I hold dearer than dear.

This Advent season I want to let myself be immersed in this story more than usual. I want to deliberately take time to read, write, and meditate on this idea - that we don't ever walk alone, and we are one - and hopefully learn something I wasn't aware of at the beginning by the 25th of December.

I'm getting ideas for my readings and meditations from Rachel Held Evans's blog site, here. I'll be following her lectionary posts throughout the season for ideas, as well, and typing out some of my musings here on my own site... which seems to see only spikes in activity around this time of year. Ha. So be it.

O come, Desire of Nations, bind... in one the hearts of all mankind

Bid Thou our sad divisions cease

And be, Thyself, our king of Peace...

2014: Day One

2013 was a year marked, for me, by certainty, confusion, then more certainty, then even more confusion, then contentedness with hints of resignation at times.  It was filled with learning and growth, as I’ve come to believe each year should be for me (if I’m exactly the same is I was on January 1, 2013, come January 1, 2014, then… what have I been up to?).  The learning and growth were in some unexpected areas, and they were much deeper than they were broad.  By that, I mean, I think the areas in which I was really beaten up weren’t that many in number, but in those areas I felt forced to dwell and dig and dig and keep digging before moving on became an option.

Thinking back on everything that happened in the last year, I realized that these areas of growth had a major common thread – they involved a huge amount of me lamenting and being intensely focused on what I don’t have.  A certain winsomeness to my personality, a specific kind of relationship, “enough” money, “enough” time (this was a big one)… I observed that I did not have these things, and I dwelled on that observation, and I cried over that observation.  A lot.

A couple of weeks or so ago, a friend asked me if there is an amount of money I could ever possess that would bring me to say, “Okay, this is enough; I don’t need anymore.”  I thought this was a good question and said I really don’t know if there is.  This friend admitted that he didn't think that, for him, there is enough – that he thinks he, “unfortunately”, would always want more.  There will always be people you’ll want to take care of and things you’ll want to do, he thought.  I agreed this may be the case.  After thinking some more, I said I don’t think wanting money is, inherently, a bad thing.  I think the issue is in having your focus be on your belief that you don’t have enough and allowing that to rule your life.  Perhaps there will always be a want, but that’s cool if the want isn't your obsession.  Just focus, instead, on making the most of what you currently have.  My friend agreed with this line of thinking and said it’s probably a good way to live life in general.  And I agreed with that.

Last year, I gave a great deal of energy to obsessing over the many things I didn't have.  It was exhausting and unproductive and made me sad and foul-tempered much of the time.  Because of these results, and the conversation with my friend, and the divine Nudge to grow and change, I’m shifting my focus to what I have right now, and there is plenty, and it is all good.  So much – so much – can be done with the bounty placed in my care at this point.  It must not go to waste.

So here’s to making the time to lay these thoughts out end to end tonight.  Here’s to perspective reorientation.  Here’s to making the most of what I have right here and right now.  Cheers.