I met Amy at The Festival of Faith and Writing in Michigan last spring. During a five minute chat, we discovered we’d attended the same college, attended the same college-town church, majored in English lit., and had recently found ourselves at home in episcopal churches. Needless to say, we kept in touch.
I’m delighted to share this advent story at Amy’s place today:
I know that Advent should include repentance. In fact, repentance is supposed to be an integral part of any advent observance. The idea, I think, is that we must prepare ourselves to receive Christ.
I’ve mostly avoided thinking about it.
I far prefer to meditate on ideas like wonder or anticipation.
If I think much about sin at all it’s to imagine the sin out there. For instance, the dark injustice of human trafficking or the world orphan crisis.
I’d rather not confront the darkness in my own heart.
Until the parents of twenty first-graders walked into a nightmare.
…
You can read the rest of the story here. While you’re there, check out Amy’s own beautiful advent series. Like me, she’s posting every day this season.
I reserve Mondays for poetry, but, truthfully, I keep opening books and closing them again. The loss of so many children and their teachers is too heavy, and I have no poem for you today.
My head is bursting with words I want to share: words of anger, words of lament. But I think it better to follow the example of Job’s companions: “they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was” (Job 2:13).
Instead of writing, I’ve been listening. Mostly to this song. It asks a question I can’t get out of my head: is love alive? Some part of my mind is sure of the answer, but most of me is anything but sure.
We are approaching the longest night of the year. We’ve known it was coming, but we didn’t know how dark it would be.
The pace of advent requires that we walk through the darkness. There can be no Christmas without this long, long night. For me, it means sitting with my questions and my tears, without reaching for answers too soon.
“When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story – to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life. But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God.”
– Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life
Explore the growing collection of Advent imagery here.
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