“Advent: The Season Of Hope”

“Part of why we observe Advent,” writes Episcopal priest Tish Harrison Warren, “is to make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more.” Advent (from a Latin word that means “coming”) begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, “which through each passing week will slowly unfurl the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit.”

Advent closes with a focus on the coming of the Christ Child celebrated on Christmas Day. Yet, as Warren points out in “Advent: The Season Of Hope” ($20.99 in hardcover from InterVarsity Press; also for Amazon Kindle), Christians believe “not just in one coming of Christ but in three: the coming of Christ in the incarnation, the coming of Christ in what Scripture terms ‘the last days,’ and the coming of Christ in our present moment, through the Holy Spirit’s work and through Word and sacrament….”

Her book is a warm and accessible entry into Advent’s four weeks of waiting, hoping, anticipating. In five short chapters (Yearning, Longing, Crying Out, Stirring, Approaching) she melds church history with her personal story of coming to terms with Advent. By that she means what she first thought was a month-long preparation for Christmas was actually about much more. “I was surprised to discover … that Advent is uncomfortably and unavoidably apocalyptic, more concerned with a vast cosmic battle than dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.”

It's not about bad second-coming theology, which produces fear, but the yearning for the return of Christ “in glory,” where “Death will be undone. Tears will be wiped away,” where “all of our longings meet their end in Christ coming again, bringing healing, peace, joy, and an unimaginable wholeness in his wake.”

The coming of the Holy Spirt at Pentecost created the church, however imperfect, and, as she quotes theologian Michael Horton, who grew up in Paradise, it is now “the age that Jesus inaugurated … disrupting the powers and principalities that keep us from recognizing him.”

And so, she writes, “We need him to come to us, to rescue and restore us, even today, in our everyday lives.”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany”

“We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,” writes poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, “But he is with a million displaced people/ On the long road of weariness and want./ … His family is up and on that road,/ Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,/ … The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,/ And death squads spread their curse across the world./ But every Herod dies, and comes alone/ To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”

This portion of Guite’s poem, “Refugee,” commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, reminds readers of “what might be called ‘the shadow side’ of the Christian story, … a season that looks back at the people who waited in darkness for the coming light of Christ and yet forward to a fuller light still to come and illuminate our darkness.”

For Guite, who has performed in San Francisco and other US (and UK) venues, poetry can “help us restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us….”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany” ($15.99 in paperback from Canterbury Press Norwich; also for Amazon Kindle) provides reflections on each poem so that the revelatory words of a John Donne lie clear before the reader. 

Contemporary poet Luci Shaw, in “Kenosis,” writes of the babe: “So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,/ broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,/ wept for the sad heart of the human race.”

Advent brings joy, too; Guite includes his sonnets “written in response to the seven Advent prayers known as the ‘O Antiphons’” addressing Christ “by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!” ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light! ‘O Emmanuel!’” For December 19, Christ is the “root of Jesse,” but more: 

“For now is winter, now is withering/ Unless we let you root us deep within,/ Under the ground of being, graft us in.”

"Far From Home: A Story Of Loss, Refuge, And Hope"

Chicago-based children's book editor Sarah Parker Rubio was born in the US but grew up in Costa Rica and Ecuador and is married to a Columbian composer. One day she heard a story about the global refugee crisis, and could hardly imagine what she'd tell their two sons if suddenly the family had to leave for another country. 

Yet she realized that the children and their parents caught in such a crisis were not so different from her own family. She imagined "a little boy who ... surely loved his bed and his toys and his grandparents. ... But the little boy in my imagination had to leave it all behind just because of where and when he had been born."

So she wrote "Far From Home: A Story Of Loss, Refuge, And Hope" ($14.99 in hardcover from Tyndale Kids; also for Amazon Kindle), beautifully and sensitively illustrated by Fátima Anaya.

A young boy, clutching Rabbit, is suddenly awakened one morning by his parents. "We have something to tell you," his father says. "I opened one eye. Mama and Daddy tried to smile. 'I don't think I want to hear what you're going to say,' I said. I was right."

They had to leave home. Now. "'For how long?' I asked. 'A long time,' Mama said. 'Maybe forever.'"

Eventually they arrive at a place where others like themselves are waiting, and a wrinkled old woman tells him a story about another boy long ago who also had to leave his home suddenly. 

"His mama and daddy tried to tell him why, but nothing they said made any sense." But he survived. "He grew up and helped many people. He could heal people when medicine didn't work. He could feed a crowd with one person's food. ... But he never forgot what it was like--the leaving and the waiting and the different."

We realize loss, too, is part of the Christmas story. On the last quiet page Matthew 2:13-14 says it: Jesus' parents must flee with him to Egypt. Yet "no matter what we have lost," Rubio has written elsewhere, "there is Someone who never loses us."