Three years ago this week I drove around a roundabout on Main Street in Concord Massachusetts where I taught preschool, snowbanks full, candles glowing through dark windows, a wooden Nativity scene. Concord is an intellectual town not particularly concerned with religiosity other than for the sake of tradition, and so the sight of Christian celebration was very striking. But I reacted with an involuntary cringe that was evidence of my ambivalence for religious yearning at the time, at least within the walls of a church.
Today I had planned to begin a new blog tradition, "Mary Oliver Monday." I went to the store to buy a book for my nephew, whom I will miss so much this Christmas while staying in Florida. I came home with a few bags of materials for gift making, did some laundry, and spent the evening decorating ornaments with the ladies of the church I am now attending. Throughout the day, a growing sense of emptiness began to knot into a sorrow which did not allow me to concentrate on anything I tried to do. The dark silhouettes outlining the evergreen trees in Washington had been present in my mind all day, as though I would be going home. And every year I am stricken by the darkness that hits so early in the afternoon this time of year, even if I grew up with it. Just an hour under the fluorescent overload of commercialized Christmas today was enough to drive me back to the same hunger I have so often felt since that anguished New England season, a slow hope bringing me home. Thomas Merton may have been on to something when he said that "advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments." More than any other writer I know he talks about finding hope in Christ in deep darkness. And so, for Monday, here is Thomas Merton on Advent:
"It is important to remember the deep, in some ways anguished seriousness of Advent, when the mendacious celebrations of our marketing culture so easily harmonize with our tendency to regard Christmas, consciously or otherwise, as a return to our own innocence and our own infancy. Advent should remind us that the “King Who is to Come” is more than a charming infant smiling (or if you prefer a dolorous spirituality, weeping) in the straw. There is certainly nothing wrong with the traditional family joys of Christmas, nor need we be ashamed to find ourselves still able to anticipate them without too much ambivalence. After all, that in itself is no mean feat.
But the Church in preparing us for the birth of a “great prophet,” a Savior and a King of Peace, has more in mind than seasonal cheer. The Advent mystery focuses the light of faith upon the very meaning of life, of history, of man, of the world and of our own being. In Advent we celebrate the coming and indeed the presence of Christ in our world. We witness to His presence even in the midst of all its inscrutable problems and tragedies. Our Advent faith is not an escape from the world to a misty realm of slogans and comforts which declare our problems to be unreal, our tragedies inexistent."
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