After Black Friday............

Black Friday is the name our present has given the day after Thanksgiving. I discovered it is called "black" because retailers know it as the time of year when it is hoped that sales move from the margins of red or gray into the black and farther into profit margins. Evoking both buyer and seller competition, steep sales and loud advertisements make for a frenzied scene and the need for stamina. Now, I for one prefer to watch from home but still sense the fervor that begins on Black Friday and continues in a hectic race until Christmas. I noticed, that while I was not officially participating this past in the buying frenzy, I found myself analyzing how many customers were in the six check-out lines, how many items each were purchasing, as well as, which clerk seemed to be at the top of their game. In the moment, I said to myself, “Bill, just relax, be still and don’t get excited. It’s not going to be worth it.”


Yes, the commencement of the Christmas shopping season overshadows the commencement of a far quieter season. This coming Sunday; the season of Advent signals the coming of Christmas, in the Church world, though not in the way that Black Friday signals the coming of the same. "Advent is about the spirituality of emptiness," writes Joan Chittister, "of enough-ness, of stripped-down fullness of soul." It is a far cry from the hustle of the holidays that is a race for storing things up. Speed-hoarding through the days of Christmas preparation, Christmas itself even becomes anticlimactic. "Long before December 25th everyone is worn out," notes C.S. Lewis, in God In The Dock, "—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making... They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house." But, you know, the opposite is true. I believe Advent is a season meant to slow me down, to open windows of awareness, to trigger consciousness. It is about finding the kind of quiet and the sort of emptiness that can hold the fullness of God as an infant in my awareness.

Of course, for even the quietest of hearts, this God who becomes human, the incarnate Christ, is still a mystery. But mystery, like beauty and truth, is well worth stillness, wonder, and contemplation. And this mystery—the gift of a God who steps into the world he created—is rich enough to make the most distracted souls bow. "Let anyone with ears listen!" said Jesus repeatedly throughout his life on earth. "But to what will I compare this generation?" he added. "It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn'" (Matthew 11:15-17). I can open my mind to hear the great and unsearchable things I do not know, things like the Incarnation that I may never fully understand but am always invited to know further. Or I can look for all of Christmas to correspond with societal whims and unconscious distractions.

Christ will come regardless. The hope of Advent is that it is always possible to make room for him. I am reminded of a marvelous book, entitled: An interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-1943, the writings by Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who composed a remarkable series of journals in the darkest years of Nazi occupation before being sent to Auschwitz, where she died in 1943. In one of her entries, Etty wrote, "sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes." I am aware, when I think about it; Advent can be this simple; the invitation of Christ is this simple. Let anyone with ears listen! Contemplating Christmas need not mean aggressive lists and budgets, endless labor, and fretful commotion.

I ask myself isn't Advent, after all, about the riches of being empty-handed; empty-handed, so that I can fully hold the mystery before me and nothing less; empty-handed, like the God who came down from heaven without riches or power, but meek and small—and full of everything I need.