A Month and A Season

After a long absence from the blogging realm, I sense that it's time to make a return. As each new month opens, and I take stock of the previous month's memories, journal entries, and other mementos of daily life, I attend to what I've done well, what I've neglected, and what calls me to grow. As this new month coincides with the opening of the Advent season, I'm sensing a synergy between my return to greater intentionality in prayer and contemplation on the one hand, and on the other, nudges toward creative writing I've experienced since the end of the summer. Both aspects of my life were sometimes diminished by the responsibilities, activities, and general pattern of another instructive, insightful, and life-giving semester of theology studies. Writing about joys and blessings, struggles and fears, and the people who helped me to live into them more fully seemed so weak and empty compared to the experiences themselves.

Advent, with all its powerful imagery, likewise pales in comparison to the mystery of the Incarnation toward which it points. These weeks offer countless reminders of that original experience of awaiting the moment of God taking on flesh and dwelling among us. The words of prophets and evangelists that are read at liturgies over the next four weeks tell us that Christ is coming; the mood of prayers and reflections upon these texts invite us to consider our own levels of readiness, desire, and openness with respect to this divine-human arrival. For a season, we are invited to trust in the future, and to recall the blessings of the past, while being rooted in the present.

It's my hope to gradually delve back into this blog by way of slowing down and carving out space for creative reflections on life, with the lens of Advent to sharpen my focus. Unlike the narrative in the lectionary, the ending of this newest stretch in my life's journey remains unwritten. Yet I enter it with hope, curiosity, and faith that it will, like each year's Advent journey, lead to a new beginning shaped by a timeless truth.