Can You Flunk Advent? I Didn’t Mean To Find Out

On the far side of the room from where I sit most work days, I can see our Advent wall hanging: the clay half-circles reading Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love cascade down the wall next to our front window.

I’ve been able to see them from this seat for the entire last year…because I never bothered to take them down. It wasn’t intentional exactly, just like it wasn’t intentional that I never managed to take out the little Guatemalan nativity set I’ve had for over a decade. My wife and I haven’t made an Advent wreath in about eight years because a cat will inevitably chew on it. I’ll bake, a staple of Advent with my mother and grandmother, but often not until after Christmas Day. That, at least, is a hazard of the job: as a children’s ministry professional, I’m going to work right through Christmas Eve. How, then, am I supposed to show up to Advent?

On Flunking – Or At Least Falling Flat

We all know the adage: if they wanted to, they would. 

I’m an Advent flunkee at least in part because I don’t really want to enter into this season. All my devotional energy goes, like that of many parents and caregivers, into making seasonal magic for the children in my life, preparing in my own parish while resourcing other communities. My season is consumed by folding paper mitres on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, creating pageant sign-ups, and changing over the prayer cards and underlays in our Godly Play room. It’s spent looking ahead to Epiphany door chalkings and laying out the spring program calendars. 

Advent appears on the horizon and I shrug my shoulders.

Part of me is, I think, still the child who dreads big family Christmas gatherings. Advent tightens in my chest, filled with the expectation of noisy relatives, foods I didn’t much like, and disrupted routines. Even if, at the end of the day, I go home and cook dinner with the knowledge we won’t see anyone for Christmas until just before Epiphany, while my wife cares for sick horses and cows at the large animal hospital and I sleep off the pageant excitement.

As For The Incarnation

If the spiritual preparation aspect of Advent is one reason I’m not terribly successful in my devotions, the incarnation-driven elements of it all may be the other. It is, after all, the thing we are preparing for: the coming of Jesus in human form and all the fragility of that. 

My physical form hasn’t been terribly kind to me. We all have our encounters with the challenges of embodiment and surely there are others who have had greater difficulties with this whole thing, but one of my closest friends and I spent our college years joking about how it would really be preferable if we could simply mount our heads on pogo sticks and go about in the world as such. A wild image, I know, but neither of us were in great shape. While I was riddled with pain and fatigue that would eventually be diagnosed as a connective tissue disorder, my academic compatriot was regularly felled by seizures. Now, in my mid-30s, I refer to myself as “cut and pasted together,” my ankles braced when I leave the house, my neck sturdied by a fused segment. Is this what God was choosing?

I will be the first person to talk your ear off about disability theology and Nancy Eisland’s The Disabled God, but ultimately that’s more of a Lenten way of being and thinking (a season I’m much better at, to be fair). I have an excellent life in my disabled body, one that I love in many ways, but incarnation and embodiment aren’t necessarily easy things.  

As I sit and write this, it is not as though Advent-adjacent accoutrements don’t surround me. Kelly Latimore icons, a Circle of the Church Year hanging, a tiny altar with Mary and the infant Jesus that sits behind my desk. None of it seems to call me in – and that’s okay.

I say it again and again in my work: we get more chances. The Church has organized time with beginnings that are like endings and endings like beginnings, always coming around again, and Advent is part of that cycle. Maybe this year, when it ends, I’ll manage to take the Advent hanging down from the wall and pack it back up with the other Advent and Christmas decorations in the closet. Then, I can let the season close itself until next year and try again.