advent 1.2

This afternoon I lit the candle that has been an implicit sort of Advent candle in my five years of marriage. On our crazy day-after-Thanksgiving shopping trip, my mom and I always visit a department store and always buy holiday candles there, inexpensive ones in glass jars with names like "mulled cider" and "winter berry." I go back and forth between preferring peppermint and cinnamon; this year I went for cinnamon, and this afternoon I trimmed the wick and lit it. Now the apartment is full of spice.

I will burn this candle when I am home all the way through Advent; by Christmas, it will be an empty jar with the faintest layer of brown wax.

How do we prepare ourselves? What exactly are we waiting for? What is the meaning of the empty jar?

advent 1.1

Malachi 3.1-4

"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in the days gone by , as in former years.

As Josh and I drove home from our Midwestern family Thanksgiving tonight, I watched the raindrops on the windshield catch and throw the glow of red taillights in front of us and white headlights from across the median. I thought about Advent, the Church's long-standing tradition of contemplating and preparing for the coming of the Messiah, an already-not-yet reality that is as crazy as it is lovely. Drew S (quoting someone else) recently reminded me that Advent is our opportunity to enter into theo-drama, which (having never read the theologian Balthasar who made the term famous) I took to mean deliberately and thoughtfully re-enacting the story of waiting for Messiah.

This year I am especially distracted. I am preparing for the hugest exams of my life, facing a variety of other school/work deadlines, and carrying a full plate of responsibility in my church community. I am also going through my first holiday season without a glittery-nail-polished, laughing and loving Grandma. And I am tired, not just the yawning kind but also the marrow-deep heart-weary kind. Watching the rain play with car lights tonight, I thought about how important it will be this year for me to stop and think about the waiting and the coming, and how hard it will be to find the time. Yet I also thought about how, in another sense, I feel as though I am living in the waiting, the weight of it wound up in my shoulder muscles, the longing for Good News audible in each accidental sigh.

Many of us are in this place: our lives are mini-theaters of waiting. My hope is in a Promise, an irrational (anti-rational?) faith that Word could become Flesh, that a green branch could grow out of the mess and burned rubble of human flailings, that those in darkness might see a Light, that the paradox of purification might bring joy and peace. Even so come.

poem

"And What Do I Owe You, God"
Jack Kerouac

And what do I owe You, God, for my gifts:
I owe you perspiration and suffering and
all the dark nights of my life:
God I owe you godliness and diligence,
God I owe you this blackest loneliness,
and terrified dreams--
but humbleness, God, I have none and
I owe it You: for I would have You
reach down a hand to me, to help me
up to You--Oh I am not humble.
Give me this last gift, God, and I will
be humble, I will owe You humbleness,
but only give me the gift,
Spit in my soul, God, for asking and
always asking, and for not giving and
owing what I have given, and give,
and shall give: God make me give.
Old Job there of the three thousand five
hundred years a-mouldering in his grave,
Old Job there is your servant, God:
forgive me for my youth, then forgive
me for it, God, oh make me a giver.

five-sense friday

The sky is sort of gray today, but the sun is making its way through. I have been looking up articles all morning and trying to make sense of a 33-novel list: themes? Continuity hiding somewhere in there? Oh, life.

In the meantime, I am...

smelling: leave-in conditioner in my hair; frozen pizza baked for lunch (real food is for people with Time)

hearing: a leaf blower? lawn mower? vacuum cleaner? somewhere outside or in another apartment; the fan-hum of my laptop; Josh turning pages across the room (they are thick pages and make a very satisfying ssshhh when he turns them)

tasting: bridge mix, a birthday gift saved for this moment of academic crisis; and earlier this week, an utterly phenomenal meal at Cafe Bernard for Josh's birthday (pan-seared pork tenderloin with carmelized onions and a dried cherry sauce, intensely garliced-up mashed potatoes, vibrantly steamed vegetables ...)

touching: a pen Tom gave me, and the notebook I carry around everywhere, full of exam notes and questions and thoughts that seem brilliant at the moment of scribbling and then two weeks later are utter mysteries. I love the notebook. I love the process.

seeing: bright screen; tottering stack of books; cards on the wall from friends; light at the end of the tunnel.

ode on delightful neighbors, or, cake

S is my neighbor, and I sometimes watch her cat. His name is Baudelaire, and he is poetic, with a little goatee and a smidge of ennui.

Yesterday S knocked on my door and brought me cake: apple and lavender cake made with dried lavender from her own mother's west-coast garden. It may also have real vanilla in it. I am eating it now, gearing up to work on an essay revision I've been putting off, and it is utterly inspirational. I'm not sure if I'm being inspired to work on the revision or inspired to move to France and plant a garden, but either way, I'm inspired.

Thank you, S.

On My Couch

I spent something like 90% of my waking hours on this couch today. With those pillows and blankets. And with soup. And during those hours, I abandoned all attempts to read, or think deep thoughts, or work on my to-do lists, or anything of the sort. I watched episode after episode of Gilmore Girls and worked on mending, thimbled finger and all. I also drank vast quantities of ginger ale and ate soup and yogurt with those delicious blueberry preserves.

I spend a lot of time on this couch. Typically, I read on it. Sometimes I accidentally fall asleep. Occasionally I rope Josh into watching an old movie with me, and we sit on the couch together. More often, our shared couch time is something like this, our legs competing for space and our book covers flirting with one another:

But today I was on my own. Just me and those Connecticut crazies. Watching Gilmore Girls made me think about the kind of girl I was in high school and college and the kind of person I figured I'd grow up to be. That's a question to ponder. I will ponder it as I meander into the kitchen to spoon out some more yogurt. Then I will probably go to bed.

I forgot people got up this early + five-sense Friday

The light is creeping up on me; a few moments ago, all I could see through the gauzy dining room curtains was black, but now I see a sort of hazy distinction between bricks and window frames on the next building's walls. A glow seeps down into the alley, filling the (maybe) three yards of space between my windows and the neighbor's, reminding me that other people are alive and perhaps even awake mere feet away.

Josh is off on a marvelous journey, and I am nursing a sinus infection in my PJs and his sweatshirt. Apart from calling the mechanic about our wonky car that keeps stalling out while we're driving it (a problem, I suppose) and trekking to the market to buy yogurt to replenish the good bacteria that's supposed to live inside me, I have cancelled all of today's appointments. I will wear the comfiest socks in my sock drawer and listen to the classical radio station and eat soup. And read books. Oh, the books.

So rather early, here we have it:

seeing: that stealthy morning light competing with my lamps. Also, the untidy wreck of a week's end, which is somehow comforting.

smelling: not much. My sniffer's not working so well right now.

tasting: tea. Wishing for the taste of anther cornmeal scone, but we finished them yesterday. Perhaps I will make more. And blueberry preserves, which are life-changingly delicious

feeling: soft couch cushions.

hearing: water in the pipes for downstairs neighbors' morning showers. Old buildings are cozy like that, reminding one that there's no such thing as alone.

five-sense friday

seeing: emails from students asking for help with their papers! lots of emails! lots of question marks! lots of theory-driven panic! Also, the delight of larger print than usual in the book I'm currently reading, which is not so much a treat for my eyes as it is a relief that fewer words per page = less time spent! Yesterday, the magic moments of autumn dusk in the city, when warm incandescent lights switch on before the sky is fully dark, and the golden electric glow illuminates and is illuminated by the lingering blue around it.

hearing: a Ray LaMontagne CD I had in college--his smoky voice makes me nostalgic for Ohio's wooded back roads and the kitchen windowsill in my first apartment, with its stubborn (if pitiful) pot of chives. Also, earlier today, R's loud and sudden laughter, the sign of a 19-month-old's unabashed delight at the noise and force of windblown leaves racing and bouncing over the sand at the beach.

smelling: popcorn. Of course. A Friday night alone means popcorn for dinner.

tasting: tea. Also, anticipating the taste of pumpkin-spice waffles tomorrow.

feeling: cold, the chill that is beautiful when fall lets us have some sunshine along with its breezes.

72

When my grandma planted things, she cared for them, and they grew.

When my grandma wrote love in a letter, she underlined it at least three times.

When my grandma filled her dinner plate, she piled it high, and she peppered it well, and she raised the food to her red lips with a fork held elegantly in crooked fingers. When the plate was empty, she filled it again.

the now of now

I walked into the dining room this morning and stopped at the sight of this light on the table, sunlight illuminating a candle that was my grandmother's, a saucer that belonged to some mysterious but loving caretaker for many years before I found it in a box of china in a thrift shop, a book (on my comps list) that arrived last week and surprised me with its maple-leaf cover almost as much as it surprised me with the beauty of many of its essays. The sunshine comes in brief rectangles these days, and we take what we can get.

Here is a bit from one of those surprisingly lovely essays:

In contrast to the temporality that Heidegger derived from Pauline apocalypticism, [the temporality of the kingdom Jesus preached] is not a futurally oriented temporality, full of anxiety about what is coming next, of fear and trembling at the uncertainty of the time. On the contrary, the coming of the kingdom lays anxiety to rest, for the rule of God, which is in the midst of us, sustains us. Rather than something futural, this is a presential time, a time of presencing, which lets today be today. By trusting oneself to God's rule, the day is not drained of its time. Today is not sacrificed to tomorrow, spent in making onself safe and secure against tomorrow. It is a temporality of trust, of trusting oneself to God's rule, and in so doing to time and the day.

John D. Caputo, "Reason, History, and a Little Madness"