Gayle Boss - All Creation Waits: The Mystery of New Beginnings

All Creation Waits

The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings

2016 First Printing

All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings

Text copyright 2016 by Gayle Boss

Illustrations copyright 2016 by David G. Klein

ISBN 978-1-61261-785-5

The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boss, Gayle, author.

Title: All creation waits : the Advent mystery of new beginnings / Gayle Boss

; illustrated by David G. Klein.

Description: Brewster MA : Paraclete Press Inc., 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026453 | ISBN 9781612617855 (trade paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Advent--Meditations. | Creation--Meditations.

Classification: LCC BV40 .B675 2016 | DDC 242/.33--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026453

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

For Doug, and Kai and Cotter
my grace heaped upon grace

and for Cheryl
godmother and soul friend

Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God. If I spend enough time with
the tiniest creature, even a caterpillar, I would never have to
prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.

Meister Eckhart

When our first son was a toddler I wanted to add an Advent calendar to our familys Advent practices. Before his birth we had already begun to take back late November and December from the holiday season, doing a few things that, though very simple, startled family and friends. Wed given up colored lights and Christmas decorations for four candles on an Advent wreath, only putting the decorations up, with the tree, on Christmas Eve. We waited until then, too, to sing or play or listen to Christmas carols, keeping quiet except to sing O Come, O Come Emmanuel each evening around the lit wreath. Now and then someone dared to ask us why our home was so un-Christmasy. More people asked more pointedly after our son was bornas if we were denying him some essential of childhood.

We decided to strip down and step back after I read a few paragraphs in a rather dry tome on the history of Christian liturgy. Those paragraphs worked in me like fingers lining up the cylinders of a lock. I still remember the click when that internal lock popped open.

I learned that the roots of Advent run deep beneath the Christian churchin the earth and its seasons. Late autumn, in the northern hemisphere, brings the end of the growing season. When early agricultural peoples had harvested their crops and stacked food in their larders, they gave a collective sigh of relief. Their long days in the fields were over. For their labor they had heaps of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat. The group body called out, Feast!

At the same time, no matter how glad the party, they couldnt keep from glancing at the sky. Their growing season was over because the sun had retreated too far south to keep the crops alive. Each day throughout the fall they watched the light dwindle, felt the warmth weaken. It made them anxious, edgy. Their fires were no substitute for the sun. When they had eaten up the crop they were feasting on, how would another crop grow? Throughout December, as the sun sank and sank to its lowest point on their horizon, they felt the shadow of primal fearfear for survivalcrouching over them. They were feasting, and they were fearful, both. Yes, last year the sun had returned to their sky. But what if, this year, it didnt? Despite their collective memory, people wedded, bodily, to the earth couldnt help asking the question. Their bodies, in the present tense, asked the question.

Our bodies still ask that question. In December the dark and cold deepen, and our rational minds dismiss it as nothing. We know that on December 21, the winter solstice, the sun will begin its return to our sky. But our animal bodies react with dis-ease. We feel, The lightlifeis going. Those particularly afflicted know themselves as SADSeasonal Affective Disordersufferers. Some of us cope by seizing distractions the marketplace gleefully offers: shopping, parties, more shopping.

To be sure, some part of the holiday season is celebration of the harvest, for us, as it was for our ancestors, even if our personal harvest doesnt involve crops and barns. We throw a party to mark the end of another year and all its brought. We do this in a big, bright, loud way. But for us also, as for our ancestors, the dark end of the year brings unrest. It is an end. It comes without our asking and makes plain how little of lifes course we control. This uncertainty, we dont know how to mark. And so it marks us. We feel weighted, gloomy even, and we feel guilty because voices everywhere in myriad ways sing out, Its the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

The church history book that got hold of me told me that my own annual December sadness was no reason for guilt. It was a sign of being wide awake in the world, awake enough to sense loss. And furthermore, there was a way to engage that sadness. That way was Advent.

The early Fathers of the Christian church read the ebbing of light and heat and vegetable life each year as a foreshadowing of the time when life as we know it will end completely. That it will end is the rock-bottom truth we sense deep in our primal bones every December, and it rightly terrifies us. To their and our abiding fear of a dark ending, the church spoke of an adventus: a coming. Faith proclaimed, When life as we know it goes, this year and at the end of all years, One comes, and comes bringing a new beginning.

Advent, to the Church Fathers, was the right naming of the season when light and life are fading. They urged the faithful to set aside four weeks to fast, give, and prayall ways to strip down, to let the bared soul recall what it knows beneath its fear of the dark, to know what Jesus called the one thing necessary: that there is One who is the source of all life, One who comes to be with us and in us, even, especially, in darkness and death. One who brings a new beginning.

This is Christian tradition at its best, moving in step with creation. When the suns light and heat wane, the natural world lets lushness fall away. It strips down. All energy is directed to the essentials that ensure survival. Engaging in Advents stripping practicesfasting, giving away, prayingwe tune into the rhythms humming in the cells of all creatures living in the northern hemisphere. We tune into our own essential rhythms.

So when I wanted to add an Advent calendar to our practice, I looked for one that would, like fasting, giving away, and praying, help us enjoin earths seasonal rhythm. The ones at Christian bookstores featured a thumbnail-sized cast of the Nativity behind the daily doors. Better than pictures of candy canes and gift packages. But I was looking for daily miniatures that were less about Christs human birth and more about the