Advent Meditation by Fr. Kenneth Tanner

I am grateful for Halloween. It’s the defensive wall that keeps Christmas from taking over October, from creeping earlier and earlier into autumn.
I love it’s neighborly, childlike goodness; I t’s reminder that there’s something greater than darkness and death, that resurrection is the end and not the grave, and so our fear of the dark is based on an illusion. (I guess what I love is something closer to the Day of the Dead, All Saint’s, and All Souls, than how some celebrate Halloween.)
Thanksgiving, my favorite weekend of the year, is almost now eclipsed or taken up into Christmas, especially the way it felt this year.
Do not get me wrong, I love Christmas. My Spotify Christmas playlist—no humility, no apology—is the best on the planet. I like way too much of the culture of Christmas, much of the ways my fellow Americans celebrate it. 😃
Yet I *cherish* Christmas because of what it means for humanity: God granting his permanence to our nature by becoming flesh.
Still, in my mind and heart, in contemplation and practice, in the worship of Holy Redeemer, we gratefully keep a holy Advent for three-four weeks *prior* to Christmas.
Our family and our community slows down and ponders the mysteries of the human God, this speechless baby in a feed trough who at the beginning spoke all things into being.
We also watch and wait for the coming of God once again in human flesh at the end of time and on our altars at the Eucharist, the good news that our human brother—acquainted with our sufferings and temptations and griefs, the one who loves us more than he loves himself—is our judge, that the dark red fire of his love will at his second coming like a good surgeon laser away everything in us that is not of love.
We often say that someone who suffers a physical trauma is not quite his former self but the promise of Advent is that we are not quite our future selves, that we wait in hope for all the chaff in ourselves to be separated from the wheat.
I don't know about you but I long for the work of God that will make me a new creation, free of sin consciousness, even the memory of sin—mine or anyone else’s.
Forgiveness is a great and remarkable grace but all that we have done wrong must also be made right and only the human that is God can do that.
I have no idea how it happens but Advent celebrates the promise that our collective and personal violations of love will—in the end—be somehow made right. Alleluia.
Anyway, it was even stranger this year to watch everyone dive into the deep end of Christmas for ten days before Advent had even begun. 🤦🏻‍♂️
Now that Advent is here, I walk in Christmas and Advent together, hoping for authentic contemplation of the great mysteries, holding at bay the madness of some aspects of our culture’s celebration, so that my arrival at the manger and the wondrous twelve days of Christmas (Dec 24-January 6) that follow will land me in the realms of glory, where real joy and peace and hope and love are encountered in the song of the angels, the surprise of the shepherds, the heart contemplations of Mary, even in the delayed adoration of the Maji.