This Sunday it all begins again, a new church year, as we enter the “waiting” season of Advent, the time we have set aside to get ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas.
It has always intrigued me that we being the church year with waiting. Doesn’t a beginning imply that the waiting has already happened? Why not simply begin the church year with Christmas?
I wonder if we begin with Advent because the waiting is so very important, that to begin the church year with Christmas runs the risk that we will forget about the waiting. We won’t take time to get ready. And the time spent waiting, waiting both for the celebration of Christ’s coming to us as a baby as well as for his return, is the time that spirals us off of chronos time (the time of clocks and calendars) and into kairos time (the time that exists outside of clock time, the time of wonder, absorption, of getting lost in play or work). Only as we enter this other kind of time can we truly enter the mystery of a God that participates so fully in human life that he became a baby, a part of a human family.
Perhaps a poem, from Madeleine L’Engle’s book The Irrational Season will help:
Let us view with joy and mirth
All the clocks upon the earth
Holding time with busy tocking
Ticking booming clanging clocking
Anxiously unraveling
Time’s traveling
Through the stars and winds and tides.
Who can tell where time abides?
Foolish clocks, all time was broken
When that first great Word was spoken.
Cease we now this silly fleeing
From earth’s time, for time’s a being
And adoring
Bows before him
Who upon the throne is seated.
Time, defeated, wins, is greeted.
Clocks know not time’s loving wonder
Day above as night swings under,
Turning always to the son,
Time’s begun, is done, does run
Singing warning
Of the morning
Time, mass, space, a mystery
Of eternal trinity.
Time needs make no poor apology
For bursting forth from man’s chronology
Laughs in glee as human hours
Dance before the heavenly power.
Time’s undone
Because the Son
Swiftly calls the coming light.
That will end the far-spent night.
Happy New Year!
