It was sort of like "Oh, yeah I totally have time to do that before Christmas! Plenty of time left. No need to stress yet." and then that time was taken up with other things and before you know it, it's the 20th and I have 2 pairs of socks left to knit and only one of them has even reached 25% completion. I intended to write a post about advent weeks ago, several actually and now there's only a few days left.
I was going to spin more this month and be on top of Nerd Wars challenges...yeah. I have about 1 oz of fiber on the wheel and I only have one project tied into a challenge. My dissertation hasn't been touched since November, I almost completely forgot about it when I was calculating how I can finish some more challenges by the 28th.
So. Advent. I've always viewed Advent as the season of preparation for Christmas, but very much focusing on the nativity story rather than the time before it. The weeks before Christmas were a time to consider the reason why we celebrate Christmas, not a separate time with a different purpose.
These two posts by Haley over on Carrots for Michaelmas sparked my interest in the liturgical season of Advent and the purpose it serves. It makes complete sense when you think about it that Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter. The word literally means 'coming.' A time of waiting and hopeful anticipation characterized by reflection and contemplation of coming events, but there's an element of grief as well. Just as the somber atmosphere of Good Friday gives way to joy on Easter morning, we look to Christ's birth with heavy hearts considering the emptiness of the lost world He came to save.
Prior to Jesus' birth, the Jews studied prophecy, read current events, pleaded with God and anxiously awaited the coming of the Messiah much as Christians do today in looking to the second coming. It shouldn't be difficult to imagine what they felt as they looked with hope to the future. I think there are three advents to consider this time of year. Advents past, present and future. Christ came to earth in the first advent, He continually comes into each heart which accepts Him, and He will come again in the second advent.
During this season we remember what it would have been like before the first coming by paralleling it with our own anticipation of Christ's return. There was war, hardship, slavery, bondage, cruelty, death, all the evils we see in our world today existed then and the people mourned and cried out for deliverance. Their hope lay in something they did not fully understand, something which had been promised for generations, but seemed a long time in coming.
Turns out some songs considered traditional Christmas music are actually Advent songs. One of the most common is O Come, O Come Emmanuel. I haven't stopped listening to Christmas music, but I've been trying to listen to Advent music as well. I've listened to this playlist which is on Spotify. I signed up to listen to that and I really don't like Spotify, it seems like there's an ad every 3 songs and I don't want to get emails and little notifications about what all my facebook friends are listening to, I thought I did it so that it wouldn't connect with my facebook, but apparently not. So I made my own playlist(most of the songs are the same) on grooveshark which is equally free but doesn't require a download and ads are much less frequent.
I tried to find an Advent Bible reading plan which focused on Advent rather than Christmas, but this proved difficult. Maybe I just don't know the right places to look. I found one that was sortof what I was looking for but not quite. I fully intended to do some research and make my own, and then one day I thought 'I need to do that or I'll run out of time.' and I looked at the calendar and it was the 18th already. So I don't think I'll get that done this year. There is hope for 2013 though.
Since I've been figuring some of this out as we go through the season I wasn't very prepared for observing it fully. Now that I've learned more about it though I'll hopefully have a better plan next year.
This post is part of the Little Holydays link-up. Check out some of the other posts from this week here.
1 comments:
Thanks for linking up with us! Things never go quite as planned during Advent for us (like this year Jesse Tree just didn't happen at all) but I feel like I learn more about what it means to wait each year and there's always next year for Jesse Trees, right?
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