In the darkness... we wait

As a minister, I have a lot of friends in ministry.  Due to this overabundance of religious folks in my life, my Facebook newsfeed has been flooded with Advent posts.  Most ministers in my denominational tradition and similar traditions have a great appreciation for the church calendar and often try to fight against the ads and the and commercials that have been blaring Christmas music for months now.  And while the commercial Christmas season is upon us, the Church is in a season of waiting.  The Church has found it fruitful to engage in a time of waiting.  So we wait.

And while I could go on and on about waiting for this Christ Child--waiting for the small and vulnerable baby to be born as the first sign of showing the world a subversive way to be in the world-- this season of waiting is always wrapped in the darkness which consumes us.  There are so many wonderful things about the Christmas story and layers to the advent waiting, and while I appreciate the many angles of Advent, I am most enthralled with the small candle that is lit in the darkness, reminding us that this darkness will not last forever.

I have great appreciation for the intermingling of the pagan traditions of the winter solstice and birth of the Christ child.  Christians have not developed anything new when they created a season of waiting for the light in this season of darkness.  Instead, they shared in this waiting with people from around the world, putting their own angle on it.

I have a really hard time with winter.  Winter has always been my least favorite season.  I have a really difficult time enjoying the cold, long nights.  As much as I love a good bourbon on a cold winter night, I would still, on any day, rather be watching the sunset at 9:30pm in the heat of the summer.  But every fall I find myself fighting for daylight as it slips away, day by day.  And then as December rolls in, and I find myself again defeated in my fight for the light, I wait.  I know that I must wait.  The light is coming, even if it is not yet here.

Soon after Ashley and I first started dating, she spent a summer working in Ohio at the Arc of Appalachia Nature Preserve.  One of the landmarks that the preserve has acquired is a Native American mound formation called "Serpent Mound".  And while I will not claim much knowledge about the ancient culture that built this mound, it is clear that there was a huge appreciation for the astronomical calendars, in particular the winter and summer solstices.  The giant mound formation which forms a huge serpent is built in such a way that the sunset of the summer solstice sets directly in line with the head of the serpent and the sunrise of the winter solstice rises directly in line of the coil of the tail of the serpent.  How cool is that?

picture of the summer solstice celebration, 2010

The solstices, these days, are celebrated by local pagans and hippies at the mound.  The summer that Ashley worked at the Preserve, we went to celebrate the longest day of the year with the drummers and meditation circles.  And while I cannot claim to know what these ancient cultures thought about these astronomical events, it was quite the experience to spend a solstice on this site that has surely had visitors and celebrations for thousands of years.  I hope to one year spend that winter solstice up on that hill.


Winter begs us to wait and look for that light that is to come.  And as the early church leaders placed this Christian celebration right in line with pagan celebrations of the solstice, they entered into the larger dance in which we are just a part.

So as the minutes of light continue to slip away into the darkness, every year I enter this season of Advent with an expectant heart.  I wait for the light to return.  I join in the pagan celebration in waiting for the solstice.  And I join in the Christian celebration in waiting for the vulnerable Christ candle to be lit in the darkness of winter.

Anger

This morning, I had an early encounter with the world as I dropped Ashley off at work.  She starts work at 7:45, so  I was off to run some early morning errands.   As I made my way through the Austin traffic, the humdrum of the morning commute, I came across a man crossing an intersection, and clearly upset with something.  As I keyed in on this man, scanned the situation to try to piece together what happened, I realized that he was telling off a truck that had inched a little too close to the cross walk.  With the full -bodied, every-inch of his being, full-lunged expression, this man made sure to let the truck know that he was going to cross the road anyway.   And he did... making a commotion the whole time.

As I drove on, I thought to myself, "Wow, it's not even 8am and this man has had quite the day."  It takes a lot for me to get that worked up that early in the morning.  But as I think back on that encounter, between two strangers (I presume), I can't help but wonder why this man got so mad over such a minimal situation.  How does this man have the energy to put so much into his ranting about the trucks misstep?  Why does he react so violently to such a mundane situation?

I heard a story on NPR a few months back about how easy it is to de-humanize driving.  Most road-ragers out there, whether it be some or most of the time, somehow make a mental shift about the car and the person who is driving it.  In our brains, we go from this is a person driving to this is just a metal box in my way.  We put our blinders on to the humanity driving or even riding in the other car and instead of making safe and smart decisions, we often get filled with rage because someone cut us off, or because someone didn't press the gas as soon as the light turned green.

I'm guilty.  I have been known to be road-ragey from time to time.  But this morning, as I watched a man verbally accost a truck, I ponder a few things: Why is he so angry?  How did the truck driver respond to that?  Did that encounter put a damper on the start of his day?  Was he screaming right back at the man in the street?  Or was he caught off-guard and shocked by the encounter?

It causes me to slow down a little bit (both on the road and mentally) and remember that our lives are in concert with so many different people throughout the day.  Strangers, friends, partners, family... And when we dehumanize the very being of another person, we are missing the point.  Even if that person has really pushed our buttons.  And sometimes we will encounter people who are having a bad day.  People who are going to be angry and mean regardless of how kind your expression and inviting your words. People are going to cut you off in line at the school drop-off and not notice that the light has turned green. But instead of using that as an opportunity for lashing back at the anger in the world, perhaps we take it as an opportunity to absorb some of that anger and to put grace and peace back into the world.  Perhaps we look into the eyes of that other person and see the humanity in them and respond accordingly.  It may not seem like a lot, but it does create a little more peace in this world.