“Enby, I don’t like to wait!” is one of my 3-year-old’s refrains these days. For the past few weeks, I have often responded, “Yeah, waiting is hard. We have a holiday coming up that’s all about how hard it is to wait. It’s called Advent.” Advent is the first season of the Christian liturgical year. It takes up the four Sundays before Christmas. At Christmas, God takes on flesh that is bound by death and the forces of evil—including (but not limited to) the politics of Empire—in order to be in solidarity with the suffering and dying, the last, the least, and the lost, and, ultimately, to raise that flesh, and, with it, all of us and everything that exists, to friendship and intimacy with God. In Christ, the nations are judged and the poor are liberated, the valleys are exalted and the mountains made low, slaves are freed and debts are forgiven, and death itself is undone.
But, in Advent, we wait. With Mary, we can rejoice because the savior is already alive and growing in her womb. With the church, we wait with “joyful hope” because we know that liberation is coming. And yet, with the poor, the suffering, and the discontented, we also wait with sorrow and longing because we feel just how keenly we need it to come—how painful and alienated our lives and world are without it. Something is just wrong with the world. We see its symptoms everywhere—the planet is on fire, millions are locked up, poverty and human misery are everywhere, and the nations invent new and more monstrous ways of destroying each other every year—but, at the bottom, it isn’t any one thing: the world itself is the problem. It just hurts to live in a world where Christ hasn’t come yet. In Advent, we get to talk about this, to sing about it, to pray about it, and to express our longing for a new world and a new way of being alive together.
Join us for evening prayer this Advent season:
- Saturday, December 7
- Thursday, December 12
- Saturday, December 21
All services start at 5:30pm and will be held outside around the fire pit at 617 Hoyle Street, Durham NC 27704
ABOUT THE ART
The Madonna del Parto (Our Lady of Parturition) is an iconic depiction of the Virgin Mary as pregnant, usually pointing to or cradling her belly, where God is being made flesh. The ninth-century fresco in the crypt of Santa Prassede in Rome is the earliest known depiction of a visibly pregnant Mary. [She] is flanked by saints Praxedes (Italian Prassede) and Pudentiana (Italian Pudenziana), sisters and martyrs, since the painting is from a chamber that contains their relics.