Reflections on the First Sunday of Advent

First Sunday of Advent 2020

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I am sitting in the car with my dog in the parking lot of the Nordic ski center.  My son has his first unofficial day of cross country ski practice today. Unofficial, because we still do not know if the state youth sports organization will allow sports to go on at all. His high school is not a mountain school, but we are close enough that they have fielded a team for many years. Nordic is more like a club than a fiercely competitive sport there; anyone can come and learn to ski. The school supplies all the equipment. We just have to buy his pass and get him up the mountain. It’s not a problem on a sunny, blue-skies day like today. It’s a little more problematic when winter storms finally arrive. They haven’t yet, and there is no snow in the forecast for the next few weeks. This is winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California these days.

Behind me, there is a beautiful, bright, warm ski lodge with a locker room, a fireplace, and hot chocolate. It’s closed now because of the COVID. So I wait in the car. Other parents are in their cars around me, all of us alone. It’s the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. I predict a slow drive home, as we will have to enter the traffic stream that will be crowded with Bay Area bound folks returning from their long holiday celebrations in Reno and Lake Tahoe. We live near the I-80 corridor, a major freeway that runs from San Francisco all the way to Baltimore. Its first major destination spot after San Francisco is Reno (sorry Sacramento, but most people don’t think of you for a weekend getaway). I-80 also delivers people to the smaller roads that circle around Lake Tahoe. Our drive up the hill to the ski resort was not a problem this morning. But since it is the last day of a long weekend, I expect that our drive home will be touch and go. From the parking lot of the ski resort, I can watch traffic on the freeway. It’s moving, still. But that might not last long.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent.  It’s the first Sunday of Advent, and I am sitting in a parking lot worried about traffic. Also, I worry that my son’s ski boots that he wore last year are too small and might hurt his feet. His feet, apparently, are larger than most. The coach is aware of this and has ordered the next size bigger (47s, which doesn’t mean anything to me, but which might to someone reading this). I am thinking about all this, while churches around the world are lighting the first Advent candles. My good friend, a new friend, Patricia Wadenpfuhl shared her own Advent customs on a recent blog post. It’s a beautiful read. You can find it here: http://www.paperthinplaces.com  I love the idea of having a personal Advent ritual and customizing it so that it rich for me. She inspired me to try to find my own Advent table piece this week. She lights her candles every day, instead of just once a week on Sundays.

On her recommendation, I bought two Advent devotional guides to help honor this season: Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, which is a compilation of reflections from authors ranging from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Annie Dillard, and Walter Brueggemann’s Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent.

I turned to Watch for Light  this morning and read a Henri Nouwen piece. Nouwen writes, “…all the figures who appear on the first pages of Luke’s Gospel are waiting. Zechariah and Elizabeth are waiting. Mary is waiting. Simeon and Anna, who were there at the temple when Jesus was brought in, are waiting. The whole opening scene of the good news is filled with waiting people. And right at the beginning all those people in some way or another hear the words, ‘Do not be afraid. I have something good to say to you.’ These words set the tone and the context. Now Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon and Anna are waiting for something new and good to happen to them.”

They are waiting for something new and good. They are told they don’t have to be afraid.

I am also waiting right now. (I think that all of us are, no?)

Sure, I am waiting for my son to finish ski practice. I am waiting to see how bad traffic will be in another hour or so. I am waiting for my daughter to come home for Christmas break. I am waiting for a COVID vaccine. I am waiting for Mercy Center to reopen again, for retreat guests to return, for the chance to practice massage again. I am waiting for the chance to gather in person with my centering prayer group on Wednesday mornings. But beneath all this, down deeper, I am waiting for some of  my  sadness, born of a fresh, difficult life season, to lighten.

I wonder if I can claim Nouwen’s words for myself today, for this new season I’m in. You probably sense that this sadness I’m feeling is not because I am waiting in the car instead of in the ski lodge, or that I’m worried about traffic or that I miss my daughter who is away at school, although I do. For all of us, there are deeper kinds of waiting. Here are Nouwen’s Advent words that help me today:

“Do not be afraid. I have something good to say to you.”

In the dark places, in this grief, is it true that something beautiful could be coming, that these words are for all of us, for me?

It’s a promise that seems  too good to be true. But I think that is what the Gospel is all about. Something good is coming. And maybe this peculiar pain is necessary for it to be born.

At least that’s what I’m praying today, on this first Sunday of Advent, in the car in the parking lot of the shuttered ski lodge.