Preparing for a Mystery
Not Yet, Yvette is my favorite Advent story, with nary a scripture or traditional liturgical image or color in sight, for the way it so accessible-y and lively-y portrays the delicious tension between waiting and preparing for something big about to happen. My favorite popular television Advent moment–you didn’t know there are Advent moments on popular network television, did you? My favorite popular television Advent moment is from the late-nineties sit-com NewsRadio. In one episode pompous, self-absorbed newscaster Bill McNeal decides he wants to be a father. He goes to an adoption agency, fills out some paperwork, and expects to bring a baby home with him. Instead, the agency staff inform him that he’ll hear back from them in about nine months.
“Nine months!” comes the reply. “Whoever heard of waiting nine months for a baby?!”
Inconvenient facts get in the way of easy laughs. Some facts left out to make room for that laughline are these: the paperwork for adoption takes more than a few minutes to complete, and is followed by reference checks and finger–printing, and a homestudy, and only then the wait for an infant, measured in years not months. And, would-be-parents with fertility challenges wait years, not months, for a baby, too. Still, both the never-been-quite true predictable nine months wait for a baby and the more often true, significantly longer, utterly unpredictable wait for a baby have relevance for Advent.
This season of waiting and preparing for Christmas, for the birth of something–a baby, a savior, a peace, joy, love, a mystery–this season of waiting and preparing doesn’t last nine months (thank goodness) but it does go by both too quickly and too slowly. It’s over in a flash and drags on interminably. Whether our personal focus this time of year is on Christmas or Yule or just getting to the end of year that hasn’t been all that fun, we’re living in the midst of preparation for Christmas all around us, and further, we are preparing in some way for whatever it is we’re waiting for.
Many years ago I saw one of those out-of-the-mouths-of-babes snippets in a magazine geared toward Lutheran pastors (don’t ask). It recounted the time a pastor, in early December, asked a group of kids during the children’s time in worship, if they knew what special holiday was coming up in a few weeks. And one child excitedly blurted out, “Hanukkah”.
The anecdote wouldn’t be funny if it were recounted in a publication geared to UU clergy, about the same interaction in a UU worship setting. We’d simply beam with pride and approval that our kids have a solid grasp on the reality that there are lots of religions practiced in our society (and beyond), and that more than one of them have a holiday this time of year. In the Lutheran setting there was probably some amusement and perhaps some embarrassment on the part of the child’s parents. But the thing is, we think we know what’s coming. We think we know what we’re waiting for this time of year, what we’re preparing for this time of year (or anytime). But we never really know what’s going to come, what’s going to happen, what needs preparing for.
I always think I’m preparing for all the things–Christmas, Yule/the Solstice, Hanukkah, the end of the year–both at church and for my family. But often circumstances intervene that make me scramble to rethink the emphasis and percentage of my time and attention any one of things demands of me. When I think I’ll focus on the joy and growing light, for example, world or community events sometimes cause me to pivot toward embracing the darkness or toward giving the Massacre of the Innocents more airtime than simply reading the scripture on Christmas Eve. Or I’ll get a late start on my holiday cards and have to use a New Year’s image instead of a Christmas image.
You experience the same in your lives–in December and anytime. You’re preparing for a festive and joyous occasion such as a family wedding and instead find yourselves holding vigil at the hospital bed of a love one. Your planned intimate family holiday for just you, your spouse and children suddenly grows as relatives who won’t take no for an answer invite themselves to join you. You’ve always celebrated Yule, with a burning log, a bonfire, wassail and the setting of intentions but your new partner is Jewish or Christian and celebrates a different holiday with an entirely different set of traditions. Now you’re preparing for something unfamiliar or figuring out how to get what you both need in this season. Whatever the particulars in your life in any given year, someone might ask you, “what big, important, special thing is coming for you in a few weeks?” And before you have a chance to give your answer, the universe might blurt out, “Hanukkah!”
A friend sent me an Advent calendar this year. It comprises twenty-four small red or white boxes, each containing a small puzzle of a New Yorker cover. It’s part of a trend of adult-focused Advent calendars, a trend I may have more to say about some other time. I’ve always understood Advent calendars as a tool for helping children get through the interminable early days of December when all they can focus on is the BIG night and day when Santa arrives and leaves behind bulging stockings and stacks of gifts. The little chocolate or picture behind each door is a tiny surprise, the discovery of which discharges a tiny bit of pent up anticipation, and in theory at least, that helps make the wait for the 24th and the 25th tolerable. In this regard, the ritual of opening each tiny door or drawer in more elaborate calendars, is a tiny celebration preparing us for the big celebration.
This year, as Soul Matters invites me to consider the Gift of Mystery this month, I’ve reframed my understanding of Advent calendars. What if we were to think of each door, when opened, revealing a little mystery, preparing us for the big mystery at Christmas? Since what comes to us this month is often so completely different from what we think we’re waiting and preparing for–in other words, since what comes to us this month is so often a mystery, why not spend the weeks leading up to Yule, Christmas, New Years, preparing to receive a mystery? Can Advent build our spiritual tolerance for mystery? Even more, our spiritual celebration of not-knowing?
As I said when I was last in the pulpit, way back last month, way back before the last major holiday, two weeks ago, concentrated doses and intense practice of spiritual attitudes and habits at holiday time both fill us up for the year ahead and condition our hearts and our minds, making it a bit easier and a bit more automatic to access and express and live into those attitudes and habits throughout the year. Advent brings multiple layers to this experience, like the images we sometimes see of a photographer taking a picture of a photographer taking a picture of a photographer.
The days of December between the first and the twenty-first for Yule or between the first and the twenty-fourth for Christmas, or the weeks of Advent from four Sundays out until Christmas Eve, and the way we live them, the things we pay attention to, the stories we tell and the songs we sing, prepare us for what we will encounter at the end of the waiting. And in turn, the holy nights and days themselves (the shortest day and the longest night; Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day), and the way we live them, the way we celebrate them, prepares us for beginnings and endings, the interplay of holy light and darkness, the birth of wonder and joy, the miracle of perseverance, the prayer for peace, whenever the Universe shouts “Hanukkah” or “Happy New Year” or “Blessed Yule” or “Behold the birth of a child of the Divine” throughout the year.
"simple, though not easy
this waiting without hunger in the near dark
for what you may be about to receive." (from Grace by Esther Morgan)
Waiting without hunger–I interpret that to mean waiting without tightly held expectations–is not easy. We want to know–how many guests will be at our table; we want to know what time they’ll arrive; we want to know who will be at our in-laws home when we arrive there; we want to know when at last we’ll welcome a child into our family and whether they will be an infant we’ll cradle in our arms or a teen who will feel most loved when we accommodate their gaming habit and allow them to wear a headset to the dinner table. We want to know when peace will descend and justice flow down like water. We want to know when depression will lift and joy return. We want to know when the drinking or drugs or gambling will stop. How can we prepare? How can we be ready if what we’re waiting for and hoping for and praying for might not be what we get?
Popular culture says, life is what happens when you’re planning something else. The wise ones of ages and of faith and of poetry say:
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent, Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah,* the Lord. 12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’
Oil enough for one night burned for eight
On the longest night of the year the earth turns again to the sun
fling your heart wide open to mystery, for something as tiny and unlikely as a grain of sand blazes into a meteor worth waking for.
None of this is to say we should never hope, should never make plans, should never long to know what will happen when. Hopes and desires and plans are human nature and can serve us well. Neither is any of this taken individually or together the same as the optimistic child who was certain that there must be a pony buried in the gigantic pile of horse manure on Christmas morning. It is more like my friend who bought her first house in late autumn and called me in spring to say, “Lisa! We have flowers! We didn’t even pay for them.”
Preparing for mystery is about giving free rein to our curiosity and stretching our receptivity. About the necessity of holding planning and lack of ultimate control in creative tension. That is to say, preparing for mystery is an exercise in remembering that the Universe is vast and we are small. Our intellect, our will, our ability to imagine and create and build, to shift the course of events and shape our world are powerful beyond what we ordinarily perceive or believe. And still, the forces of the Universe are more powerful yet, and the actions our neighbors, relatives, governments take to shift the course of events and shape our world are, in the end, as unpredictable as we think they are predictable. If we’ve prepared for mystery to the extent we can ever be truly prepared, then when answer comes back, “Hanukkah” or “nine months” or “teenager” or even “trip to rehab” we’ll know that is exactly what our lives have been preparing us for all along, in ways we didn’t recognize. In ways we still might not recognize, but may become clear to us as we live into the call of the moment–serving wassail at New Year’s to unexpected guests and opening stockings in waiting rooms with strangers looking on and reading all the how-to books over again and staying open to love’s arrival whenever it might finally come in whatever form it might take.
May it be so for you this Advent. May each day open as if a door into mystery. Until Mystery arrives and you move gladly into Its embrace.
Amen.