Advent

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down

This is the first in a series of Advent meditations. But before I continue, I want to remind you that you can sign up for one of my two January Rule of Life workshops: Friday, January 10^th, 11 am – 3 pm EST OR Saturday, January 11^th, 9 am – 1 pm EST. I’d love to have you begin your new year with a communal reading of my book, In Good Time, and an invitation into concerted reflection on what you’ll make “regular” this year as you live your life in faithful response to God’s voice.

Here’s what Donna had to say about the workshop, after she attended:

“I walked away from Jen’s workshop with a variety of tools to help me discern and live out my calling in Christ. One of the most helpful (and freeing) aspects of writing a rule of life involved naming my gives and desires in this current season and asking the Lord to incorporate them into holy, regular habits. Jen is a thoughtful communicator, and her workshop materials are comprehensive and realistic. I wish I’d had these resources earlier in my life.”

Find out more about registering for the workshops here.

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I drafted a start to this letter last Tuesday, before the house filled with guests and I disappeared into the kitchen. I didn’t finish the letter then, and I’ve abandoned it now, given my suspicion I didn’t believe a word I wrote.

I wasn’t intentionally lying to begin a series of Advent reflections on the theme of God’s inbreaking into the fullness of ordinary time, when God sent forth his Son (Gal. 4:4, 5). I had all kinds of beautiful quotes from the collection of Jane Kenyon poems I’ve been slowly reading this year, poems that render ordinary things exquisite in natural light. I wanted the beauty of Kenyon’s poetry to figure how miraculously ordinary and exquisitely wonderful the Advent of God, into our world, might be taken to be.

The occasions of Kenyon’s narrative poems are the ordinary events of life unfolding in its seasons. Kenyon lived on a farm in New Hampshire, which gave her occasion to live close to the weather and the rhythms of the earth. The poetry travels from “Rain in January” where “smoke from the chimney/could not rise.” Rain and snow give way to the material advance of spring, or “Mud Season,” whose “purgatory bare ground/is visible, except in shady places/where snow prevails.” In summer, the narrator is caught watching the boats on the lake belonging to “Camp Evergreen.” They look “like huge bright birds” and they “sail back when someone calls them.” Kenyon notices the quality of light, as the seasons change and days close with “the delicate sadness of dusk.” She pays attention to what we might otherwise miss, which is, of course, her job as poet. To help us see and in seeing, to help us love all that is otherwise perceived as unlovely for its un-remarkability.

All this would have been a lovely segue into the ordinariness of the story in which God clothes himself with flesh and chooses to be born a baby to human parents in a backwater village of the Roman empire. The Advent of God into such an ordinary landscape is surely what no one suspected and even wished. (I’ve always found it so interesting that the apocryphal gospels depart from the ordinary to give us more magical, otherworldly accounts, which ironically, we might all find more believable than the humble scene of a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.) But I suppose what ultimately felt “false” about my original draft (and proved false, as I began reading Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ) was its quality of having been hand-selected as a theme, rather than derived from a more historically rooted meaning of Advent. The baptism of the ordinary was surely a meaning I imposed on Advent rather than a meaning I received from God’s church.

I had a suspicion, as I wrote, that this was the reason the writing stalled. I was an “observer” of Advent in the most typical form of self-guided evangelical observance. I picked and chose the lovely and the resonant with little consideration beyond my own curiosities and yearnings. What meaning could Advent have then, beyond this look in the mirror? To what did the story and season give witness beyond my own desire to be witnessed, in the banality of my own human existence? Because wasn’t this what I was really writing about when I wanted to feature Advent as a story of God’s inbreaking into the ordinary? Wasn’t this part of the hope I was finding in Kenyon’s poetry, who locates her creative work in the kitchen?

These lines are written

By an animal, an angel,

A stranger sitting in my chair;

By someone who already knows

How to live without trouble

Among books, and pots and pans . . .

Reading Rutledge, I could see I was wandering from the path of Advent’s deeper meaning. It’s true that Christians keep a different kind of time than the rest of the world and that Advent is the beginning of our calendar year. (I wrote a whole book on this, pushing back against the goads of the productivity mindset of American hustle culture and reminding us of the time we live and receive as diving gift.) The collection of sermons Rutledge delivered throughout active ministry as a priest in the Episcopal church do not center on the first inbreaking of God into ordinary time, but rather on the second coming of God to which we, as a church, look forward. This second coming, she says, is a neglected theme of Christian preaching, and I am inclined to believe her, especially in many evangelical churches where sermon calendars are as hand-selected as this Substack. What should we talk about in January? How about attention and distraction? Yeah!

The church calendar, beginning with the season of Advent, is meant to remind us that we are caught up in a story much bigger than ourselves, our families, and the mere handbreadth of our lives. Advent, in fact, is a season to remind us that the story begins and continues with God’s action, not ours. Here I’ll quote Rutledge at length because it’s just that good:

“Related to the second coming, which Jesus repeatedly says will come by God’s decision at an hour we do not expect is the Advent emphasis on the agency of God contrasted with the ‘works’ of human beings. An exclusive emphasis on Advent as a season of preparation risks putting human endeavor in the spotlight for all four weeks of the season. All the Advent preparation in the world would not be enough unless God were favorably disposed to us in the first place.”

Now there’s an idea: that the season of Advent is first of all, not about us. Not about our preparation. Not about our waiting and watching. Because isn’t this really the point of the Old Testament prophets, that God’s people have grown estranged from him and dull to the extent of their estrangement? Isn’t the point that they no longer wait patiently and watch hopefully, that they no longer scan the sky and hope for the coming of God? Isn’t the point that idolatry is the water that rushes in when God is taken for missing? This is one theme Isaiah strikes, in the 63^rd chapter. “O LORD, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?” (v. 17). Isaiah is asking for God to “look down from heaven and see,” (63:15). He is summoning the zeal and might of God, which no longer seem readily available to the people of God. “The stirring of your inner parts and your compassion are held back from me,” he figuratively laments (v. 15).

Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down (Isaiah 64:1). This is the Advent cry of the prophets, if not the people.

I’ve done so much thinking, in the last years, about the gift of human agency. It’s the reason I’m so compelled by the practice of a rule of life, which invites us to participate in and cooperate with the action of God. It reminds me that God has dignified humanity with the real responsibility—and real freedom—to choose and to act. But I would be wrong to ever convey that human agency is the first and primary mover in the salvation story. No, this is the grace of the Christian calendar, that it begins with the recognition that we did not look for God, did not watch for God, did not wait for God—and he came anyway.

I can’t help but remember that this is exactly as it happened to me, at the age of 16. I was typically seizing all of life’s pleasures with the gusto of youth, imagining that I would “return” to God when life was more conveniently arranged with sobriety (and boredom). I’d stop sleeping with my boyfriend, stop partying with my friends, stop lying to my parents, stop stealing lingerie from Victoria’s Secret when I was thirty and driving a minivan. I was not looking for God in any meaningful way, and still, the circumstances of my life were providentially arranged for the July day in 1990 when I stood beside a lake and heard, somewhere deep within me, the summons of the living Christ. I was not looking, was not watching, was not waiting—and he came anyway, making an offer of abundant life that I could not refuse. His “inner parts” stirred and his “compassion” was not held back from me though there was nothing to commend me to his notice. That this is my story is a humbling reminder that I was dead in my sins, deaf to his voice, and the only solution was a rescue operation.

God was forced to act because I could not.

And isn’t this just where we all begin, in the Christian life? Our backs turned—and God comes to us, sings his love over us, bids us to come and follow though it means a death to former ways, even a former self. It means that I can still hope for God to come and to act when I am not praying as I should, not hoping as I must, not rehearsing the truth I know but cannot now recall.

Advent announces that God acts, when we don’t. And on a Monday morning, with boxes of Christmas decorations brought up from the basement and yet to be opened, I find that a saving thought. I am often too tired to act, too unwilling to act, to indifferent to act—and God comes anyway. This must have a truth Kenyon herself recognized, which she rendered in her poem, “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks.” Like the “I Am” statements in the Gospel of John, one imagines the voice of the narrator as the voice of Christ.

…

I am the patient gardener

of the dry and weedy garden…

I am the musk rose opening

unattended, the fern on the boggy summit . . .

I am the one whose love

overcomes you, already with you

when you think to call my name. . . .”