Advent One: A Story

December 2023

When I was a child, I was mesmerized by the Advent Season.  Mesmerized is a powerful word, and completely accurate.  I still see that sense of rapt wonder on the faces of children watching candlelight, and I hope it still shows on my own.

Advent, which means coming, is the four-week period in the Christian Church that precedes Christmas, its purpose to grow in us a feeling of anticipation that something miraculous and longed for is about to happen, while also inviting us to learn how to wait for it.  We don’t barrel headlong toward Christmas but instead search out a place to sit quietly each day, preparing our hearts to welcome The Light once again into our beautiful but broken and dark world.

My mother set the tone for Advent every year.  We waited for the first Sunday of Advent as she arranged the Advent wreath with three purple candles, one pink one, and a white Christmas candle in the middle.  We waited each day to see whose turn it was to light a candle on that wreath and whose turn it was to extinguish it with the brass snuffer that only came out in December.   We waited to see what would appear in each tiny window of the Advent calendar, not chocolate, but a picture of an angel, a lamb, a star, or a shepherd, leaving glitter on our fingertips, and we knew we were one step closer to Christmas morning.  But not yet.  While neighbors strung lights and put up their trees, we waited until the week before Christmas to decorate, each of us given a box of ornaments to put where we willed on the tree. We were getting closer . . . .

In the waiting, I experienced true anticipation and longing, and the pain that sometimes comes with both.  I was given space to savor the silence a single candle flame can create and I came to believe in the power of that same candle flame to completely dissolve the darkness.  I learned that tree lights glowing in a darkened room are one of the most sacred sights and that longing can fill such a room it becomes tangible.

The past several years have brought the hardest difficulties to our world that I have ever experienced, living with so many but not yets. So it seems to me that reclaiming the wonder of light and the power of tradition and the awe of anticipating God breaking through time and space can lead us back to being mesmerized, mesmerized by something bigger and much more mysterious than our own little worlds, mesmerized by hope.

May this Advent mesmerize your own heart, whoever you are and whatever you believe.  ~ Rosemary

Advent Waiting

It was just a candle, a taper
narrow and thin,
bought at a dime store
and yet
a beacon of mystery.
The scratch of a match
enhanced the silence,
the palm held close
to protect the light
the wick sucking breath
and catching flame—
a miracle.
It was just a candle
flickering in the dark—
red, orange,
amber, gold—twining
and elongating
like praying hands
within the flame.
And when the candle
was extinguished,
silent smoke rose
like so many prayers
from a child’s heart
to the heart of
the One
who was coming.

(c) Rosemary McMahan

Photo credit: Pixabay