The season of Advent began yesterday and so Christians have entered into the traditional season of expectation and waiting for the coming of Jesus! It will be for many “the most wonderful time of the year;” however, as you know, it can be a season that brings great anxiety, pressure, and even depression.
Last year, in a message at The Bridge Community, I spoke on re-setting the rhythm of our lives to the contemplative waiting of Advent. The message was entitled, “A Pre-Emptive Strike on a Consumerist Christmas” and I hope we can all avoid the hectic and sometimes debilitating pace of the “Christmas season.” (You can listen to the message here and you might want to begin listening at the 10:00 minute mark — this is where I begin talking about a new approach to the season.)
I want to share a great practice for slowing the pace this Advent season.
Here is an idea you can try out during your personal prayer time in the next four weeks. It’s also a great experience for families. You can easily make your own Advent Candle to help focus your prayer and devotional time during this season. Get a tall, slender candle – something like a 12 inch dinner candle. Then take a ruler and felt tip pen. Start about an inch from the bottom so there’s enough candle to stand up. Then mark all the way up the candle, twenty-eight evenly spaced segments. The candle in the picture is, of course, store-bought, but it gives you the idea!
You can then use your felt tip pen to mark the dates. Starting at the top with November 28, all the way to December 24 at the bottom. Then, choose a time every day when you can burn one segment of the candle. A slender candle evenly spaced will take 10-20 minutes, depending on the length, width and quality of wax.
What to do while the candle burns? You could use the time to sit in silence, or read, or pray. You might make a family commitment to sit together silently, praying for one another. Advent is traditionally a time of waiting: perhaps you can pray every day for a person or place that is waiting … for news, or peace, or healing.
If you’d like a daily schedule of scripture readings for Advent, here is a good list to work from. I hope you’ll join in with this “new” tradition! It’s actually very old, but it’s been a new experience for me and my family, and we’ll be doing it again this season.
I originally wrote about this idea on The Bridge Community blog here.
I almost never hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything else on the list. In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest–when many of us have at least two email addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number–the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those who intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know God in their bodies.
