Coming
Soon:
Thanksgiving
and Advent Season
Written by
the Panhandling Philosopher and sometimes Village Idiot
There are differing customs how American
families will keep what is generically called our happy holidays from the day
set aside as Thanksgiving Day through the Christian seasons of Advent,
Christmas, and New Year’s Day. I have no wish to argue for the way to keep
those days, but want first and foremost to wish every person happy holidays
however you may keep them.
In my youth this was a time when
from Thanksgiving Day to December 25 I anticipated the gifts beneath a Christmas
tree. My desires for what I would see changed with the passing years. Would I
get that fort and toy soldiers? Would I get that electric train or racecar
track? How about the Strat-o-Matic baseball game? Those were exciting times for
a child who thought of Christmas trees with hope and big eyes. I know that
parents whose traditions or beliefs did not include Christmas trees usually had
ways to feed their children’s needs for an expectation of something that made
them hope with big eyes.
As an adult my perspective towards
the next few weeks from Thanksgiving Day to New Year’s Day has deepened or has
been lost in the frantic rushing of the season. If you are like me, the season
is marked by the loss of hope expressed with big eyes as much as it is
embracing a deeper meaning for the season than I ever understood as a child. I
find life is generally that way. My spiritual growth takes place alongside my
forgetting important virtues. Spiritual growth seldom takes place in a serene
Currier and Ives painting but in a dusty warehouse, a poor Appalachian farm
community, or a loud Bronx neighborhood. Spiritual growth is often discovered
surprisingly when someone has tired feet and isn’t quite sure where there life
is headed. For me spiritual growth doesn’t seem to come when I am serenely
keeping my prayers so much as when overcome by life I get upset and lose my
cool and then it comes to me by the day’s end that I need a reset. In the
struggle for setting apart ourselves and our lives and the world at our
fingertips as something holy and blessed I need many resets in mood and
perspective and direction.
In the Christian church calendar
that I seek to keep albeit usually in a mediocre way these next few weeks
including Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and New Year’s and beyond is
especially a season where I can seek to have my mind, heart, soul, and
direction in how I use my strength reset. I welcome a reset especially this
year.
It has been a difficult election
year. It has been an especially painful election season. I think most of us
have felt how vicious it has been. Many are fearful of what the next
administration might bring. Even those happy with the election are often
struggling with a wondering if they should be happy or if the worry of others
might be a more legitimate concern than they were willing to believe. Wherever
you are on whether this election was a blessing or a curse, or just an election
– if you are anything like me you feel the need for a reset. It is not that we
want to run away from life and the responsibilities of citizenship and
neighbor, it is simply that in the course of this year with the election
struggles we have felt that our minds have been confused, our hearts cold and
corrupt, our souls malnourished, and our direction in life knocked out of
kilter. I need a reset. I know I do.
Thanksgiving will be therapeutic for
me. We ought to give thanks every day. But when we fail to do what we ought, it
is a wonderful blessing that a day is set aside for that and we can get
together with family and friends, or simply by ourselves and mark a day to give
thanks for what we have been given. Perhaps when we most need a reset in the
course of our lives a day where you sit down and try to think of the varied
ways you have been blessed is a good beginning to transforming our way of
seeing life. The cynicism easily picked up in our days of life is slowly
assaulted when one remembers the provisions of life, the friendships of life,
the good food and drink enjoyed in life, the hobbies we enjoy, the sights we
have seen, the sunrises, sunsets, super moons, and flowing rivers, autumn
leaves, baby smiles, or an old soul facing the end with grace and expectation
like the child looking for a special gift under a Christmas tree. If Advent
season is a Christian’s concentrated effort to prepare himself or herself for
the day of the Lord’s coming then Thanksgiving may well be the day needed to
prepare ourselves to seek the Lord’s blessing not with grunts and groans but
with a sense of gratitude for all the blessings we have been given. We may well
be sinners, but sinners seldom seek the Lord diligently until they recognize
that in our sins, he has yet been faithful, good, and have provided for our
needed even in the difficulty of days in a confused darkened fallen world.
The Advent season will be an
important one for me this year. This election year has been painful for me and
my thoughts need corrected, my heart needs purified, my soul needs nourished,
and I need direction to use my strength to the love of my neighbor and the
glory of God. I so need a season of refreshing with a reset of the things I
know are important values and virtues that still I have forgotten as I have
lived with the troubles of life beating against me and with me recoiling in any
way but showing grace, love, mercy, kindness, and a quickness to forgive, and a
slowness to anger. I know I need to regain the composure of a child looking
with hope and big eyes for what Christmas Day will bring. I need to know that
as I looked forward to Christmas Day when I was a child I need to look forward
to the revealing of Christ in Christmas Day and in that glorious day to come.
For I believe that all the good and loving gifts my parents gave me on all
those Christmas Days are but symbols of what we shall be given spiritually when
we see him face to face, first by the eyes of faith seeing what is unseen, and
then in the eyes of that day seeing what we have been promised we shall see.
The wraps will come off the gift of the season in that day so that we shall see
him and we shall be like him when the gift of that day is unwrapped and
revealed in the great revelation of his glory and grace.
I know that some of my hopes will seem
naïve by the end of the next few weeks. My keeping of Advent will have flaws. I
know it will. There will be difficulties on Christmas Day. We won’t get along
quite like we should around our family tables. The truth about Christian
seasons is that all of them are preparatory. Our Advent season is a preparation
for meeting Christ on Christmas Day, but our keeping of Christmas is also an
Advent season of preparing for that day when we shall see him in unveiled glory
with our own eyes in our own skin. I have thought too little on these things
which is why I need a reset which for me will come through seasons like
thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas.
