We hear a lot of words and phrases around Advent like “stillness,” “quiet,” “making room in our hearts,” “preparing the way …” The idea of Advent is that we take this time before Christmas to ready ourselves for Jesus' birth. Officially, it is a season of fasting* just like Lent is the season of fasting before we celebrate Easter.
But that isn’t how our weeks leading up to Christmas usually work for us, is it? We rush to finish projects for our jobs before end-of-year reporting; we cram social engagements into our calendars, often to the point they overlap; we stress about finding and buying gifts, traveling, or hosting for Christmas, and maybe about the finances attached to all of that. It's hard to imagine making any time or quiet or room or preparing for Jesus at all. It feels more like chaos than peace.
You may have figured this out about me - I thrive in chaos. For a long time, that was a source of stress for me - not because the chaos bothered me, but because I was worried about what other people thought about it. Isn’t that a source of a lot of our stress this time of year? What is everyone going to think about my work when the score is settled on December 31? Will everyone like the gifts I’m buying? Who is going to be disappointed in our travel plans? Or the food we cooked? Or our Christmas decorations? Or how clean our house is? We’re worried about how other people are going to judge our chaos, or at least, the way we have dealt with our chaos.
For me, as someone who knits energy out of that chaotic skein, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was focusing on the wrong thing. Once I realized that the chaos wasn’t the problem and that my fears of failure were, it allowed me the joy I get when I accomplish things. Philosopher Frederich Nietzsche said, “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” We need that sense of play - of trying things out, whether they are going to work or not - to create something new. And then once we’ve tried something, we look at what works and what doesn’t, and we learn and grow from it.
What if we take that sense of playfulness through Advent with us? We are going to be presented with chaos whether we like it or not, so why not have fun with it? Let go of the fear and if plans don’t work out, learn from what you did and try something different next time. This is another way of being mindful in a season when it is really difficult to make time for quiet.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Pablo Picasso: “God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.”
What kind of chaos are you going to play with this Christmas season?
John Johns, Music Director
*if anyone is interested, ask me about why Advent isn’t really the fasting season before Christmas but before another feast day … it is worth a whole other blog post.