Advent Advice: Make a Wreath, Then Throw It In the Fire
Two-Minded Tips for Celebrating Advent
It’s Advent.1 Whether you’re churched or unchurched, how do you celebrate the season? I’m of two minds.
Make an Advent wreath. The church evangelizes with truth, love, and beauty. Lean into beauty. Decorate a tree, and then keep going. Make a wreath. Buy greens, wire, three purple candles, a pink candle, and a white one for the middle. Pray with your family as you light the candles. Hang lights inside, outside, in your bedroom and in your kitchen. It’s dark outside; don’t deny yourself light. Be the light.
And then light your Advent wreath on fire. Don’t just light the candles; light the whole thing on fire. Remember the words of our secular climate change prophet Greta Thunberg: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. . . I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”2 The world is on fire. It doesn’t need your craft project, which is masquerading as beauty, but only masking the truth. Tear up the greens. Rip down the lights. Take it all to the backyard, toss it in a pile, pour on gasoline, and watch it burn in solidarity with the truth of the world.
Go to church. Sure, God speaks in the stillness of snowy woods, and in a yoga class with folks loving and caring for their God-given bodies. But God also speaks through scripture and the sacraments; you won’t find those anywhere else but church. Never mind the mediocrity of the sermon, the seeming boredom and hard-heartedness of many of the regulars worshipping there, or the unnerving quiet of the Sunday School wing. Be on the lookout for just one thing: one word resonating from a psalm, one stranger who greets you kindly, one child skipping down the communion aisle. If you’re new, give it a few weeks before you decide whether to stick around. Stay at least through Christmas Eve to see the shepherds in polyester brown robes and flour-sack headpieces, guided by carboard-winged angels and a tin foil star.
Yes, go to church, but to the attic. Find the boxes with the pageant costumes. Saw up the shepherd staffs. Cut up the brown polyester robes, the cardboard angel wings, and the angels’ white bedsheets. Ball up the tinfoil star. Take it all home and add it to the burn pile. In the Gospel of Thomas someone asks Jesus how to follow him. He answers, “Quit lying.” Want to mark the beginning of the church year? Quit lying. “Most merciful God we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed,” says the prayer of confession. Actually do it. Write down everything that haunts, hardens, and divides your heart - personal sins and participation in structural sins. The only genuine search for a church will be the search for one willing to hear your confession, and able to heal your heart.
Read. If you want to understand the “Second Coming” which Advent anticipates - how it is neither the cartoonish hellscape of conservative Christians, nor the therapeutic bromides of secular culture (“All we have is the present”) - I recommend Anglican Bishop and Oxford professor N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. If you prefer spiritual autobiographies to theology, read Fred Buechner’s Sacred Journey, C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, or Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. For a shorter and more contemporary read, I recommend Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “The Cross and the Machine.”
Read, but not religious books. Add the Christian books to the burn pile. Read here about the gangs in Haiti and how they killed a young woman and then raped her mother and left her to die in the streets. Read about how the Kremlin pardons wife-killers and other violent criminals if they agree to fight in their war. Read about the anticipated plagues and fires and floods from climate change. Read a Princeton sociologist’s research about how those of us with pensions and stock portfolios, “prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least.” Don’t worry about understanding the Second Coming. Jesus advises you to hate your life (John 12:25). Worry about sufficiently hating your life,
Watch the burn pile. Watch the flames die into embers. Watch the embers die into smoke. Stay there as the world becomes nothing but dark. Wait there until Easter. Only love nailed to a cross can hold the two-minded tension between truth and beauty.
In the church the four Sundays preceding Christmas are the season of Advent. The word has its roots in the Latin word for, “coming”. It’s the opening season of the church year when Christians wait both for Jesus at Christmas and for Him to return at his “Second coming” in the future.
Greta Thunberg, quote from: https://earth.org/greta-thunberg-quotes-speeches-to-inspire-climate-action/