The birth of Christ was marked by ordinariness almost everywhere.
We have enshrined that ordinariness, now, and made nativity scenes out of the simplicity and mundanity of the manger. But the day was ordinary and more importantly for most of the world unmarked. The shepherds got to know. Mary and Joseph knew. Herod and the Wise Men knew.
But most people didn’t know. A lot of people praying earnestly for the birth of the Messiah got up the next morning and went about their business with no clue He was incarnate. People wondering if God was ever going to get up and do anything probably kept on wondering. A woman asking in her heart if God had forgotten Israel may not have realized that indeed, He had not.
I remember this when I try to engineer my way through faith. The work of God, often the biggest and best works of God, cannot be understood forward but backward. What ordinary matter on this ordinary day contains depths and implications that will leave me reeling in a year, or five, or ten?
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I glimpse articles called God Is Your Father, Not Your Dad that chide our “therapy culture” for making us too comfortable with God. While I can acknowledge that Christ has at times been co-opted by wellness rhetoric, and theology can be diluted by New Age concepts, I confess that articles like these—even just in title—raise my hackles.
Perhaps because I’ve heard too much this year about how empathy and compassion and grace and forgiveness and mercy are “soft” virtues, that the very fundamentals of Christlikeness and the fruit of the Spirit are something we ought to somehow be permitted to neglect in a so-called Christian culture that values power, strength, and worldly might and wealth over almost everything else. Perhaps because seeing the fruits of that way of thinking makes me sick to my stomach.
I often say that if I must err, I would always rather err on the side of grace. This remains true for me. When I trace back the line of my encounters with God—the personal ones, those ephemeral and exquisite experiences that are clearly God and nothing else—what emerges is love. A suffering love, a love that has died and come back, a love that speaks (yes, holiness, and yes, truth) but does so with such care and understanding that the love is undeniable.
At Advent, to walk through the way Love enters the world incarnate is the great joy.
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My church makes its own communion bread.
I did not know this until we saw the ask in the church bulletin for bakers—and there was the communion-bread recipe, right there, out for God and everybody to see. I only ever ate thin white wafers prior: to eat real bread, from rustic flat loaves baked by the real hands of the real people in my congregation—feels both sublime and deeply ordinary at once.
The senses matter, the body matters, the way we come to experience Christ matters.
And so I love this season. Give me candles and twinkling lights, and the Advent wreath, and the candle on my desk that smells like amber, frankincense, and myrrh, the olive-wood nativity downstairs. We don’t need these things to have God. We can have God and nothing else; we can have God in a cold dark cell. But to have these joys to remind us, to celebrate and taste and feel and smell the wonder of the miracle—what a marvelous grace.
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Communion, again: one of our communion servers sits in the pew in front of me.
She opens crinkly-wrapped peppermints during the sermon. She wears blue eyeliner. She knows my name and I know hers. She wears shawls with flowers on them. Every week, she looks into my eyes and smiles offers the cup and says, “The blood of Christ, shed for you.”
I sometimes wonder: one day, in the great feast, will we raise our glasses to each other?
We take care of each other, and this is the sacred duty. All of us, brothers and sisters, we take care of each other. I see it especially this year. At work, at home, in every situation: the believers ferret each other out. We smile at each other and hold up the season like a beautiful glass. It’s Advent, we say, because we are all in on the wonderful secret.
This is our family.
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It’s the first year I’ve thanked God for a cold.
Every year! I can’t avoid it. When the sore throat hit last week I almost got mad at it. But God has been teaching me that He works through all things, including inconvenience and death and sorrow and guilt and even rhinovirus.
I caught myself working on the couch one day under a blanket, poking through the packet of lozenges my husband left me and drinking the tea he made for me. I was warm and comfortable, answering texts: “not too sick!” to the friend who inquired and “I promise I’m fine” to my fretting father and ignoring my supervisor’s entreaty to just relax a little bit. My throat was sore. I was tired and full of snot. I was loved.
It was a tangible experience of gratitude and praise in the middle of a less-than-praiseworthy circumstance.
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I’m not going to get it all done.
I embraced it this year: Slow Advent. I’m doing a little bit every day. No present-buying or wrapping binges, no frustrated 2am baking, no outbursts because I’m so tired and stressed I missed the season.
It’s the best Advent I’ve had in a long time, because I let myself spend it with God.
I’ve slowed down enough to really see things, and really feel things (even the annoying ones or less than pleasant ones). I have, for the first time perhaps ever, kept pace with my Advent devotional. This season is God’s, and it feels like the first year I’ve ever given Him full custody of it.
This is the one tradition I’d like to keep.
Samaritan's Song 