If we hide the brokenness, the beauty will not be discovered; nor will it be shared with others as a source of hope. + J.R. Briggs, Fail
COVID came to our house this December like an unwanted guest.
I've had it. So has most of my family this past month during Advent. My precious wife has had it the worst, God bless her and heal her.
I've had it. So has most of my family this past month during Advent. My precious wife has had it the worst, God bless her and heal her.
Quarantine. Cancelled family visits. Unperformed musical performances that had been sacrificed for and practiced for months. Loss of taste and smell. Cabin fever. Days that run into weeks like the snot slowly and surely running from noses. Family life, work, school, and fun-snapping fidgets to get out of the house, all tangled in a funky ball of holiday twine. And multiple missed Advent masses with our beloved Emmaus City Church that help reset and reorient us back to the bigger Story in the midst of our claustrophobic little one.
Waiting and hoping. Waiting and hurting. Waiting and harming ...
To be honest, though I have been embodying some of the practices of Advent, I haven't been receiving and resting very well in the grace of what God so generously gives us during this hard and holy season.
My head and heart have been a bit clogged. And not just with what COVID coagulates. Needless to say, I haven't had the poise and presence of peace pictured above. As much as I want to be a personal cathedral that the Light of the world breaks in to illuminate and shine through to others, it hasn't been faithfully true of me in my wrestling with current circumstances, internal and external.
Reflecting on Advent during our quarantine together as a family through The Gospel of Advent (big "Thank you!"s to Marlena Graves and Rich Villodas, especially) has been hope-reminding. And lighting candles and singing beloved Advent songs, old and new, together (like versions of "O Come O Come Emmmanuel" via for KING & COUNTRY and Tomme Profitt, or "Light Has Come" by Future of Forestry, or "Light of the World" by We the Kingdom) after we receive meals from family, friends, and neighbors who have been feeding us (you all are amazing!) has been heart-warming.
And yet, I've still had times of being impatient, unkind, and distant with those I've wanted to love and serve in my own house, sometimes due to setbacks, often because of my own selfishness. When the darkness comes at the end of the day and we light the candle wreath again, the limp candle that broke weeks ago and keeps falling out of its holder is a bit like this little light of mine that keeps falling over and singeing those around me.
A Broken Advent: Broken Candles & the Tension of Advent
And then I read Kate Kooyman's hilarious and piercing "A Broken Advent" and immediately responded, "Preach, sister!"
Here are Kate's thoughts in all their glory so you don't even have to click the link above:
I have a really pathetic Advent candle situation happening in my house this season. It’s because the taper candles I bought are too big on the bottom, so I crammed them in the candle holders and hoped they’d stay anyway. They didn’t. The little wreath gets moved on and off our kitchen table several times a day (a high-traffic zone for homework, eating, and collecting clutter), and so every poor candle has now hit the floor at least once. They’re all cracked in the center, and each angles in a different direction.
But I’m sticking with my little motley candles, because of Fleming Rutledge. She is one of my favorite theological follows on Twitter (@flemingrut), and she wrote something recently about Advent candles that helped me make peace with mine: “A leading blogger is promoting the idea of giving names to Advent wreath candles: love, peace, etc. This ‘tradition’ is about 20 years old with zero liturgical background. The ancient Advent words are Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. I did not make that up.”
I had to laugh. But if you’ve been following the Lectionary texts assigned during Advent (or if you’ve been a human person in the Year of our Lord 2021), maybe this also feels spot-on to you. Here, for example, is a gem from Luke’s Gospel last week: “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” The Psalm 80 option doesn’t brighten things up much either: “O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers? You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.”
Tears to drink in full measure. That feels about right. During this Advent season, I have friends who are sick and friends who are grieving. Friends who work in hospitals, exhausted by death after death. Friends who show up every day in understaffed and underfunded schools, trying to smile and teach and carry on, like squeezing water from a rock. I have friends who are holding on by a thread. With Omicron, tornadoes, kids with guns, migrants in Hungary, a human rights crisis in Afghanistan… the whole world seems to be doing the same.
Death, judgement, heaven and hell.
Advent is hard. Not only do we live in a culture that has turned it, like everything, into an opportunity to swipe our cards (Lego Advent calendar for the kids? Or wine Advent calendar for mom?), we also live in a world that tells us every problem can be solved. Everything broken can be replaced. Everything frightening can be controlled. Everything sad has a reason. Everything hard has a purpose.
But I don’t think this is the same story that Advent prepares us to tell. That is a story that refuses to skip over the suffering, or deny darkness — but enters it instead. A woman’s vulnerable body. A town tired of outsiders. A threatening, violent government. A broken, weeping world.
Rutledge, who literally wrote the book Advent, says this: “The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the Church lives its life.”
And so we prepare to welcome the Christ child yet again. We live in the tension that hope requires; not denying our grief, our doubts, our fears. But opening ourselves to the possibility of a God who will make all things new.
With just one click I could have some pristine candles for my table, I’m not going to do it. Toppled, cracked, and precarious, they still shine in the darkness.
So, I pray, do we.
+ Kate Kooyman, "A Broken Advent"
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Light of the world, shine on me, shine in me, and shine through me again. I'm a broken Advent candle. Light me up anyways.
Fail: Broken Stained Glass & the Discovery of Beauty
I confess and repent again: I'm not the Light of the world. Nothing too serene or peaceful here. Just shards of broken Advent expectations for this season and myself.
But despite my pile of broken expectations and emotions that have cut and injured, God still had one more word of grace to share with me, and perhaps you as well, through a book on failure I finished this past weekend:
As I walked by (the broken stained glass), the angle was just right to catch a magnificent view of the sun glimmering through the jagged shards of glass still attached to the windows. Despite its brokenness, its beauty was stunning. It was beautiful because of its brokenness. When we are broken, we have the potential to be beautiful because of what works through us.
We have a hauntingly large capacity to make colossal mistakes. When we demand perfection in ourselves and others, we have set ourselves up for eventual disillusionment. In many ways our failure intersects our lives and forces us to make a decision: we can become bitter or recognize it as a place of growth and maturity.
We are broken stained glass. Will we be repulsed by that fact, or will we embrace it and see the beauty for what it is? If we hide the brokenness, the beauty will not be discovered; nor will it be shared with others as a source of hope ...
The gospel proclaims that we need help, and by accepting it we declare unabashedly, "I cannot do this life on my own." It is an acknowledgment that I cannot create a future for myself more meaningful or purposeful than God can. The first line of the Beatitude reads, "You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there's more of God and His rule" (Matthew 5:3 The Message).
+ J.R. Briggs, Fail
Amen to that. Here's to less of me and more of God and His rule and reign shining in me, around me, and through me to close this special season of Advent.
" ... the story that brought us here ain't the thing that changed,
I want to see that light shining brighter than the pain! ...
We sing these broken prayers where the light shines through,
The wound is where the light shines through ... "
+ "Where the Light Shines Through" by Switchfoot
Christ is all,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
