Advent and Christmas Seasons

Advent – Season of Waiting

Advent, the first season of the liturgical year, honors waiting with anticipation. This season also contains a journey, which seems appropriate enough, since most journeys involve a good deal of waiting. Waiting till it’s time to set out … waiting at the airport … waiting for the shuttle … waiting to check in … all the while anticipating, wondering—When does this adventure truly begin? The psalmist says “Blessed are those who have set their hearts on pilgrimage,” suggesting that the adventure began at the first stirrings, the first thought of travel, and that it may begin anew at every step.

The “Garden Goddess” pictured here is by artist Rachel Gaspers. The glass-and-concrete sculpture comes inside and sits on my windowsill during Advent, where the light from the window glows through her swollen belly.

When I emailed Rachel about using this image to evoke Mary during Advent, she startled me by replying that she had never thought of her garden goddesses as being pregnant. 

Rachel said, “I emphasized her voluptuousness, especially of tummy and legs, because those are such womanly areas of our bodies.  However, being pregnant seems comfortably right, because she gives birth to ideas that need to be nurtured into ‘adulthood’ just like children.” 

You can see more of Rachel’s sculpture and paintings at www.rachelgaspers.com.

Christmas – The Longest and Shortest Season

In the commercial world, the Christmas season has a long youth and a short old-age: born in mid-autumn, weaned the day after Thanksgiving, and dead by the close of the New Year’s Eve sales.

In the church calendar, Christmas is the shortest season of the year. It begins on the first stroke of December 25 and ends twelve days later, at midnight on January 5, Epiphany Eve. This season celebrates the birth of Jesus — born in the company of animals and angels, shepherds and kings, the young and the old, the wise and the foolish.

David and I like to give our Christmases a longer, more robust retirement. Our tree usually stays up well into the Epiphany season, and our holiday cards have been known to appear in friends’ mailboxes on the very cusp of Lent.

I like the Budweiser holiday commercials. I like the big horses, the big old fire truck, the big fir tree, the snow, the bridge, the country road. A moment of peace and beauty. God bless them, those commercials aren’t even trying to get me to have a beer.

I’m less fond of commercials about the perfect present, given and received. Teasers that show a gleaming new car with a bow on top as the perfect way to show one’s love to the spouse (and one’s wealth to the neighbors). Tear-jerkers suggesting a string of diamonds as the perfect expression of enduring love.

My own presents – given and received – aren’t perfect. I don’t know anyone well enough to give them the perfect gift. I only hope a glimmer of goodwill clings to my offerings, adds a little extra shine, wins them a kind reception.

And when I open a present, I only hope for the grace to receive the gift in the same spirit I’d like my own received, and for the heart to accept what it means to be singularly human. Along with everyone else.

One year, David gave me a book of Roz Chast cartoons and an odd, disturbing pendant he found on a Goth web site: a dragon, alive, evil, and triumphant, coiled from top to bottom around a St. George cross.

A gift that made me laugh. And a gift that made me uncomfortable, then started me puzzling about the nature of faith and fable, and the intertwining of good and evil.

Well, okay, maybe David does know me, just a scratch or two below the surface.

Here’s wishing you joy in the New Year, and new adventures, and many chance meetings on the road.

— Margaret