Advent 1.5 - Blogging

Just as I was thinking that, while I need to do some Advent writing and processing for myself, I might as well switch this blog over to private, a few hardy commenters showed up. So, I guess I'll try to keep going, and also let you know that I have a plan:

I'm trying to give some thought to the Advent Sunday lectionary texts, one at a time. If you don't know what those are: many Christian churches establish readings for each Sunday (each day, actually) over the course of a three-year cycle. Preachers who rely on that cycle of texts will be able thereby to guide their congregations through a large and representative chunk of the Bible via their Sunday sermons over the course of three years. The daily readings include a passage from the Hebrew Bible, from a Psalm, from a gospel passage, and from another Greek Bible text. The three year cycle enables a year to be devoted to each of the three synoptic (look it up!) gospels; readings from the Gospel of John appear around Easter. Since the liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, a new lectionary year has also just begun -- with Matthew as the gospel focus.

I'm also trying to be attentive to other Advent contemplations, and so on the days when I'm not ruminating about Scripture, I plan to highlight some other bloggers or websites. Today, I'm delighted to refer you to my friend Michelle's first Advent post over at Quantum Theology.

Finally, I'm writing from my own perspective. We are in Year Three of life without our son. I remember little of the last two Advent seasons, although I seem to have written quite a bit. If you have found your way here, you are probably experiencing some holiday difficulties of your own. What I write may seem too upbeat and hopeful if you are in a time of despair and hopelessness; it may be too raw and painful if you have moved on. I know, because you honor me with comments and emails, that those reading this are in every kind of place with every imaginable and complex kind of loss. I wish I could do justice to each and every person and situation, but the best I have to offer is the authenticity of my own experience, and my Advent hope that it will encourage you to delve into your own.

For now, you might wander over to Michelle's. She's writing about Alfred Delp, S.J. this year ~ someone whose courage and faith, honed as a prisoner of the Nazis, we can trust in our own times of challenge and anguish.

Perhaps what we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it. Perhaps that is the ultimate answer to the question of why God has sent us into this time . . . we have stood here on the earth with a totally false and inauthentic sense of security. So now, God lets the earth resound . . . to teach us one thing again: how to be moved in spirit.

Alfred Delp, S.J.
Homily for the First Sunday of Advent
Preached in Munich
November 30, 1941

Almost Advent

"Being shaken awake is entirely appropriate to thoughts and experiences of Advent. . . . It is precisely in the severity of this awakening , in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable."

Alfred Delp, S.J.
Written in Tegel Prison, Berlin
December 1944