Katrina Vandenberg
I am a shoulder-season person, drawn to the meditative periods of Lent and Advent over the big red-letter holy days of Easter and Christmas. Advent in particular seems to me a season of quiet and wonder; when I am feeling romantic, Advent reminds me of a pregnant woman holding her belly and feeling her growing baby kick. It is a season that acknowledges the creative power of darkness, and the ways that the frozen grounds and rivers and human imagination hold things about which we don’t even have the power to guess.
At our house, we keep an Advent wreath on the table and light the candles every night when we have dinner. We eat at five o’clock, which is early, but of course in December it’s already dark, so the candles are cheery.
At least, this is what it is like on our best days. On many other December days, I don’t feel hopeful, romantic, or drawn to mystery. It is cold out. My students have become tired and crabby. I am tired and crabby. I have papers to grade, shopping to do, and my daughter doesn’t like what I made for dinner again, even though I was sure she liked it last time I made it. Some nights I am too tired to make dinner, and we order a pizza instead.
When my husband and I were in our twenties, we were renters, regularly packing to move from one place to the next. Each time we started packing, the packing went well — at first. We resolved that, this time, we would stay organized, only to watch the process devolve into a mess. There was always a point at which our task seemed hopeless. We were far from done, but it was too late to give up and put everything back.
It was John who pointed out that our mess was a signal. Really, he reasoned, the chaos really meant the packing was almost done! All we had to do was keep going a while longer! This belief did make packing go far more easily — so much so that we started to apply our theory to other times we were trying to create major changes in our lives and it seemed that the world would not cooperate.
Now I am less sure that we discovered a truism. Instead, I wonder whether we just taught ourselves a new way to look at our lives. When we told ourselves to celebrate the messy part as proof that we were almost done, maybe we really taught ourselves, in a small way, to find peace in discomfort and not-knowing.
That, to me, feels like one of the messages of Advent, though it feels strange to equate the season with the days when I bought up every roll of packing tape I could find at the local IGA. Advent begins three or four weeks before the winter solstice, so each time a candle is lit on the wreath, the earth responds by growing darker. Once we run out of candles on the wreath, we still have months to go before the light comes back and food grows in the fields. Always, we are on a long journey of becoming.
I think of the candles on our wreath as a promise — not enough light to warm the earth, but enough to see the people I love the most.
Advent wreath and photograph by Flickr user onnola (2010), reproduced under CC-BY-SA 2.0.
