Saturday, November 29, 2003

Advent Eve

Darkness, cold, the winter coming on: all night the wind howled, and it howls still today. Last evening a loud, wind-driven rain suddenly rattled the windows. DK and I went out onto the porch to look and found it wild, warm: mid 50's, torrential rain, water sluicing downstreet, fog rising between houses, the spruce boughs whipped by wind. Today it's bright, and getting colder. Clouds in the west. Trees bare.

I have been thinking of Advent. I am trying to fathom Christ. The Dalai Lama taught: look to your own tradition. So I am looking back. The Christian images are at the neural bedrock, formed in childhood: manger, child, magi.

Advent looks ahead. So much in our life is aftermath: post-modern, post-911, post-Auschwitz, post-nuclear. But Advent is expectation, hope, waiting. Waiting for something that has been foretold, that we know will, has arrived. But it is expectation colored by all the aftermaths in which we live.

But truly, nothing has happened yet, in this moment, in this darkness, in this cold. And yet it has all happened, is happening. For now, there is nothing but the darkness and cold. We sit, open to it. Advent with and without hope, with and without expectation.

A fragment of a prayer: Come What may.


Meanwhile, An American Christmas, at the starter's bell, stampedes out of the gate.

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