The week before Halloween, I walked into Home Depot and almost walked out in protest. I was assaulted by Christmas decorations. When talking with an employee about my disgust, I was quickly told, “People are buying a lot already.”
It’s Christmas for goodness sakes – time to save the economy! On Thanksgiving Day, let’s give thanks for the opportunity to go shopping at midnight. The “holiday season” now starts with acclaims for “Black Friday” and the race to revive retail.
Apologies to my non-Christian friends who have to endure the endless clang of Christmas carols everywhere they go. Actually, it amazes me that anyone would want to sing anything on Christmas Eve after being bombarded with carols every waking moment for nearly two months. How has it come to this? This hijacking of Christmas.
The way I survive it is reading Watch for the Light, Readings for Advent and Christmas.
With a different writer every day, November 24 to January 7, the daily reminder of what this season is all about calms me and unsettles me all at the same time. Some are easier to read like “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Path. Others, unnerving: “The Shaking Reality of Advent” written by Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest, condemned as a traitor and writing from his prison cell before he was hanged.
Yesterday, from Loretta Ross-Gotta, “The intensity and strain that many of us bring to Christmas must suggest to some onlookers that, on the whole, Christians do not seem to have gotten the point.”
And from Henri Nouwen, he writes about the cultural reality that binds us: “Waiting is not a very popular attitude… For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place.”
Peter Kingsley in an interview in Parabola recognizes this same malady Nouwen writes about when he says, “We are obsessed with keeping everything going: with asking what do we do next? But what if that’ s not the right question? What if we actually have to do nothing: just go deeper and wait?
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
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