Advent in the Valley

“Be prepared, for the Lord is coming!” Matthew 24:42

Watch. Wait. Stay awake! These are the watchwords of Advent.

The past several columns I’ve talked about my desire for a more safe, sane, and holy month leading up to Christmas. At our community choir holiday concert at St. Paul’s, in Virginia City, I explained to the audience that for the world “out there” this is the Christmas season – a time of shopping and celebration – but for the world “in here” (inside the confines of the church) it is the Season of Advent.

Advent is a season of patient anticipation. In some ways, Christmas can be more special when we don’t jump the gun. We can approach the birth of Christ thoughtfully, meditatively, deliberately. How many people start singing happy birthday to one another a month or two in advance of the actual birthday?

I’m not such a stick in the mud that I cringe at the Yule-tide shenanigans of the season around the community. Winter is dark and dreary, so it’s delightful joining in and working with the community choir to provide seasonal cheer in voice and song. A goodly number of hearty souls came out to enjoy the concerts in the minus double digit temperatures that hit the region really hard this year. For that, I am thankful!

We are part of a community, and participating in activities that warm hearts and minds is important. I’m glad we could do that, and especially glad that people put the community service over a Thursday Night football game – or whatever else might have kept them more sanely indoors. One will never confuse the talents of the local community choir with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but we came together, we sang and celebrated, and then we feasted, and that was enough.

No, the world goes crazy this time of year, and that’s OK. It is the insanity of the human race that really explains why God bothered to send us more than a greeting card – or a Cease-and-Desist order, for that matter.

For millennia, God tried a number of things to help restore sanity to the world, but after Adam and Eve’s bungle in the jungle (and consequent ejection from the Game-Preserve), things just went down-hill fast.

God could have left us alone to our own devices, but we just seem to prefer the vices. During the time of Noah God put us into the wash and rinse cycle, but that didn’t seem to work either. None of us, it seems, is wrinkle free!

God laid down the law with Moses, and while it gave us some structure and parameters within which to work, we still don’t get it. It seems we’re pretty good at looking for and finding loopholes.

“Love your neighbor?” Sure, I can do that. Here are the three people on my Neighbor List. Everyone else: Watch out!

“Do not covet”? No problem. I will just borrow the money I need to buy the stuff you have that I want (whether I need it or not) – and then it’s not coveting because I’ll already have it, so there!

God tried religion, and do I really need to lay out how THAT has worked out over the past few millennia?

Ironically, the purpose of religion is to unite. The root word is “lig” (as in ligature or ligament). But we clever humans use it as a bone of contention.

The point of law is to bring order out of chaos, but it turns out that is more like nailing jelly to a hot wall. There is a law of physics (the second law of thermodynamics) that simply points out the propensity of everything to decay in time.

So, since law and religion don’t seem to be very effective in changing the world for the better, God sent his Son into the world to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. This is the essence of the Christmas story. And we can’t get it all on one day of the year, or even in a month of manic berserkery or miracles on 34^th Street.

We get it by quieting down, waiting, watching, and staying alert. Advent. It’s a good word. It means the Adventure is about to begin, and I’m excited to be a part of it here in this, our valley.