The Blogtastic Voyage Pt. 2

I cannot find my cell phone charger and it is extremely annoying that it is lost. Perhaps I will have to wait until morning to find it. Tonight is the night. The star, the sheep herders, the astrologers, the lowly...it's all in this night. A whole season waiting for this night and for the breaking of a still more glorious dawn when Christ is born. I have to admit that this December has not been as outrightly advent-driven as in previous years. The surprise bonus of such a distance from this season is that I haven't felt drawn to the commercialism so derided (and yet so followed) nor felt the pressures of obligations that used to be much beloved traditions. In fact, the only thing that I feel has been retained of this season is the waiting itself. Perhaps, to be more specific, it is not just the waiting but something that is at work inside of the waiting. A certain tension. I'll call it, the tension between hope and expectation.

I remember way back in 2004 being in a homiletics class which required an advent sermon as one of the assignments. I'll be charitable and say that what I wrote was much closer to an advent lecture than anything sermonic. Still, I remember discovering something open-ended and elusive to this whole advent position of waiting. There is the tension between the openness and perpetualness of hope and the very concreteness and very particularity of expectation. Jesus doesn't come as we expect him to. (I concluded thusly before even a word of Derrida had crossed my path) We hope beyond the particularities and limitations of our own ideas of what a savior or a king would be. We hope out of humility, out of the feeling that our sight is feeble and our thoughts are short-sighted.

But why did I feel that my sight was feeble and my thought's short-sighted. Because of that very strange, terrifying, and wonderous thing known as particularity. I cannot but hope from out of the feeble and short-sighted peculiarity and particularity of my own body, mind, and very peculiar self. The openness of hope is not without the determination of such particularity and peculiarity. And isn't it that strange, terrifying, and wonderous think known as the incarnation that we celebrate at advent? Isn't it the strangeness God made flesh that captures our imagination and also our fears. Our fears that what we hope for will, in fact, be what we expect; that our short-sightedness will get the better of us and we'll miss the messiah entirely. This is what I fear about this season. Will the waiting be in vain? Will I wait expectantly and call it hope?

I have been blessed to have read some truly wonderful reflections on advent from a friend and the friend of a friend; reflections that have spurred my thinking in directions previously occupied by the obligations that graduate study bestows at this time of year. Advent isn't advent so much as it is paper-writing season (or application finishing season). This isn't true of course; just because I'm preoccupied with the productive dialectic of Ideology and Utopia as it pertains to John Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charitie" doesn't mean that waiting is not the posture I should take. Advent doesn't go away; the monster or the messiah trekking towards Bethlehem is not stopping. That baby is coming and there's no stopping it.

I have been thinking, as of late, about typography. Typography, that old Christian practice of reading the stories of scripture and the tradition into the present, can be a dangerous enterprise (see: American and Muslim Fundamentalisms or Manifest Destiny/National Covenant). Still, keeping such dangers in mind, might there be a way to read the seasons of the Christian year into one's life. Might there be a way that I can view my life as a particular season requiring a particular "posture?" Might we think about time, not as a succession of days, but as something much more fluid and fluctuating?

I'll take as my example this season, the season of Advent. The posture one assumes during advent is, as has been mentioned above, one of waiting. Inherent to this posture is the tension between the particular and the open-ended, the ever-new; the tension between hope and expectation. Yet, what if this season and its posture extended beyond the winter? What if I experienced Advent during the summer, in the middle of ordinary time? Anyone who's gone through the application process for college or grad school knows that the most anxious waiting takes place in late February and on into the Spring and certainly not in December. Advent's status as a marker of a certain time, as a season, becomes exaggerated here. One's life is marked by a season of waiting, of being held within the tension of the openness of hope and the particularity and peculiarity of expectation, of a time that cannot simply be marked by dates on a calendar.

For a while now I have felt that my life has been one of Advent-ish waiting. The particular has presented itself but it does not satisfy the openness of hope, of desire. Perhaps that is what is most particular to hope itself, its inability to be exhausted or satisfied. I await, sometimes patiently sometimes rather impatiently, the coming of a particular fulfillment to a particular need, whatever the need might be. I also await something more. Something open and endless, something that gives itself in such a way that the adventure of exploring it in its fullness will never cease.

Yet, waiting is not all there is. There are seasons of simplicity and repentance that extend far beyond the limits of Lent. There are epiphanies that are experienced every day regardless of the time. There are whole years that feel so ordinary that they seem like they will never end. Still, this season is the season of waiting. Maybe next season will also be a season of waiting. I pray our postures will be appropriate to whatever season it is.

Merry Christmas all.