Over the next month there will be hundreds of people screaming at us through every imaginable medium, trying to convince us that a meaningful holiday season can be purchased, both with money, and with frantic effort, and that if the outlay of cash and energy is great enough, then the season will be well honored. Now, there is certainly nothing wrong about investing time and energy and even money in one's preparation for the holidays. In fact, it can be very good. The gifts and the decorations, and the social gatherings, even the hassle involved in providing all of those things, can be the building blocks of some very joyful experiences. But pretty obviously, they can also be a stumbling block, a real obstacle to an experience of Advent that is meant to be a time of renewal, a time for the gathering of one' spiritual strengths, rather than their dissipation.
Advent is a time of waiting.
Waiting that is flavored by a certain reserve, almost a kind of hush, an expectancy. For Christians, Advent is meant to be a time when we peer more deeply than usual into our own makeup, and in doing so, see there a certain incompleteness, a kind of emptiness. And we sense that not only about ourselves, but about all of the human condition, all of creation. It is a time when Christians become more sensitive than usual to the fact that the universe is what one writer has described as an unfinished symphony. A symphony in which a great deal of the score has already been played out, and played with great beauty and great meaning, but one to which the last chord has not yet been struck, and until it is, the rest of the piece doesn't quite hang together, the rest of the movement doesn't quite fall into place.