Out With the Old, In With the New (Liturgical Calendar Year)

I love the Holidays! I love mittens and scarves and pumpkin spice lattes and candles and stuffing, and telling Danielle to stop taking just the marshmallows off of the sweet potatoes, and How the Grinch Stole Chrismas, and frosty windows, and spending all my money on gifts for the people I love (not to mention time off from a slightly mind-numbing job). But if Christmas lasted all year long, it would get old. Too many obligatory work events. Too much pretending to like the "ecclectic" gifts mixed among the genuinely wonderful. Too much... cheer. Ugh... eventually I would just want to rip down every paper snowflake. The beauty of Christmas is that it's only once a year. Anything without an expiration date it eventually loses its whimsy. Looking forward to the holidays is what makes it wonderful, exciting, cherished.


We measure our lives from Christmas to Christmas, year to year. New things come into our lives, and old things (sometimes very wonderful old things) get pushed out to make room. Always change. And change always brings loss of some kind, whether great or small. Each year it seems my life changes drastically from what it was just a year before. That might just be the stage of life that I'm in. A year ago, I was living a totally different life than I am now. The year before that was an entirely different world. How can so much change in 365 days? So many small losses, so many small gains.

And how can it be that I'm simultaneously terrified of things changing, and at the same time terrified of things staying the same? What if the best time of my life comes and goes and I don't realize it? What if I'll never be as happy again as I was two years ago? My life now is good, don't get me wrong. But do you ever sort of wake up and wonder how you got here? How time moves so fast, and slow, and it feels like the weeks drag on and on as the months are flying by. Just make it through the week, soon it will be Friday. And suddenly it is Monday again. And snow is falling (wasn't it just summer?). And I understand, now, how people stay in job and situations they hate for years and years. You just keep making it through the week, without the energy to look up and think of how to get where you want to go.

This is the liturgical season of Advent, which is a time of purposeful tension. At the biggining of Advent, we're looking towards the 2nd coming, the final judgment, preparing ourselves for Christ return, looking honestly at our own sinfulness, and remembering how Israel waited expectantly for her Messiah, while again and again she turned her back on God, even as he received her each time she called for help (and so with us..). We share in their eager hope of the birth of the Messiah, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the World. The incarnation of God into the world in the second person of the Trinity, who takes this mess and gives it meaning, makes all things right again. As Eve was taken from Adam's side in the garden, the Church (the new Eve) was born from the side of Christ on the cross, the water and blood flowing from his wound as he established the New Covenant, providing himself as the passover lamb, and provided the Sacraments so that we could receive him into our very bodies through the Eucharist, and so partake in the New Covenant. That is why we rejoice during Advent, and it is a time of great joy and hope.

And so this season of my life is full of purposeful tension for me. The droll anxieties of quotidian life, the loss of change. But I also feel hope in the most real sense: the sense that there is purpose in the most commonplace day, and meaning in the simplest task. The hope that all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.