All I Really Want. Quinn G. Caldwell
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there’s another kind of waiting, too, a delicious, shivery kind: There’s smelling the almost-done pie in the oven. There’s sitting in the theater listening to the opening theme of a movie you’ve been waiting a year to see. There’s feeling the baby kick you in the bladder a week before due date. There’s lying in bed listening to your lover coming up the stairs.
Advent—those weeks leading up to Christmas—is about both kinds of waiting. On the one hand, it’s about looking around at the state of the world, at the wars and the climate and the corporations and the seasonal allergies, and longing for God to end the wait and show up already. It’s about choosing to see God’s absence.
On the other, it’s about choosing to see God’s almost-presence. It’s about looking around at the state of the world, at the struggling schoolteachers and rich philanthropists doing the right thing, at the babies being born and the love being made and the ancient stars shining bright as hope in the cold night sky. It’s about looking around at all of this, reading the signs, and knowing that everything is about to change.
Advent is about standing in the slop and calling, “How long, Lord?” But just as surely, it’s about standing in the shining, shivering with delight and singing, “Come, Lord, come.”
Lord, this world needs you, bad. Fill it up with signs of your coming, signs so obvious even I can see them, and set me to work to welcome you. Amen.
December 2
December 2
Morning
Teach us to number our days so we can have a wise heart. (Psalm 90:12)
I just love me a good Advent calendar. Growing up, we got new ones every year, carefully selected for each child. At the end of each day, we would open its corresponding door on the calendar. Some calendars had little pictures of Christmassy things behind the doors. Some were scratch-and-sniff. Some had candy in tiny compartments. Awesome.
Always, the biggest, most beautiful door on the whole calendar was the one marked “24.” It was supposed to stay closed until Christmas Eve, when whatever cool thing it hid would be revealed. (Obviously, we always peeked.)
I remember the quiet wonder with which we opened each of those little doors, so much more tangible, so much more engaging than the sedate lighting of the four Advent candles in church. We weren’t very good at saying grace at mealtimes, our bedtime rituals in those days had much more to do with toothbrushes than with prayers, and our longings had more to do with the Sears Wish Book than with the redemption of the Creation. But we gathered around those little doors each night with the hushed expectancy that they told us we were supposed to feel in church. As we did, we learned something about waiting, about counting, about longing, and about God.
There are plenty of Advent calendars in the stores, plenty online, and of course there are apps for that (though those won’t let you peek). Get on it.
O Holy Mystery, you hide behind every door and peep from every window. In these days, grant that I might learn to pause, to hush, long enough to see you there. Amen.
December 2
Evening
The Lord isn’t slow to keep God’s promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient toward you, not wanting anyone to perish but all to change their hearts and lives. (2 Peter 3:9)
Another thing I like about Advent calendars: they dole Christmas out glimpse by glimpse. They build up the picture or the story in slow, random-seeming increments. They don’t go all the way in one shot. They require pauses. They require little bursts of delight. They require patience.
Advent is about expecting the coming of Christmas, the remembrance of Jesus’ first coming. But it’s also about expecting Jesus’ second coming, the one that he said would straighten up the world, delight the good, open the eyes of the bad, and fix everything. It’s about sinking not only into the longing and trepidation of that promise but also into trust that it will be fulfilled.
Since the earliest days, believers and scoffers alike have been asking “Well, why isn’t he back yet?” And they’ve wondered whether it might be that he’s not coming back. The author of Second Peter has an answer for them: he’s not back yet, dear Humankind, not because he’s slow or uninterested or not coming at all, but because he’s giving you time to pull yourself together before he does. Time to practice seeing him in small ways so you’ll recognize him when he arrives in big ones. He’s revealing himself in slow, random-seeming increments, just little glimpses here and there of the picture he’s painting, of the story whose end he is. It’s your job to be patient, to pause, to look, to be prepared for little bursts of delight.
So why don’t you go get to practicing and open that next door on the calendar?
God, you’ve been gone a long time. The world is ready for you to come back now. But I assume you know what you’re doing, so I guess we can wait till you’re ready. In the meantime, don’t leave us without a little preview now and then, OK? Amen.
December 3
December 3
Morning
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (Psalm 90:1 NRSV)
Sometimes I think we ask too much of home. We load it up with more freight than any one word or idea or even place could ever manage. It’s not only the place we came from; but it’s also the place we’re supposed to be welcome no matter what. It’s supposed to be the container for all our soft-focus memories, all of who we used to be and used to hope we would become. It’s supposed to smell like cookies baking and sound like laughter at old stories. It’s the locus of so much nostalgia that it’s no wonder it tends to collapse under the weight of all the expectations we load it with.
Maybe you’re one of the luckier ones when it comes to home. But even if everyone there is well-adjusted, un-addicted, constantly healthy, and never resentful, even if it’s still populated by all the dear ones who have been there since you were born, even if you love being there more than anywhere in the world, still it will never be what the made-for-TV movies want you to think it should be; still it’s not likely to be all you remember or all you hope. The problem with home is that it’s full of people, and whether it’s full of their presence or their absence, at least one of them is probably going to annoy the crap out of you while you’re there.
So what the psalmist has to say should be good news for just about everybody this Christmas, whether you’re headed home for the holidays or have no home to speak of, trapped far from home or planning to host the gathering, or looking forward to or dreading whatever reunions are in your imminent future.
Because all that we ask of home that it can’t deliver, all that we depend on it for that it disappoints us in, all that we need and it will never be able to deliver? Your home can’t deliver it, but God can, and the porch light is on.
So today, look around at the home you’re in now. Change one thing in it to make it more like what a home ought to be: clean some old baggage out of a closet, invite a friend over to fill it up with love, rearrange a shelf to make it more beautiful, or go to the grocery store and pay a little more to buy the fair-trade option of whatever you’re getting. Make just one small change, and dedicate it to God.
God, you are my refuge and my might, my alpha and omega. You are my true home. Which is a good thing, since the one I have in this world is so weird. Amen.
December 3
Evening
I’m the root and descendant of David, the bright morning star. (Revelation 22:16)
Why is everything scarier in the middle of the night? A noise you wouldn’t think twice about if you heard it at noon can paralyze you at 2 a.m. A dream you’d totally just laugh off during your afternoon nap leaves you staring at the ceiling, blankets up to your chin, in the wee hours. A window that has never looked out on anything but the side yard becomes the potential frame for a vision of horror when you’re on your way for your midnight pee.
And