Blessing all that is bruised and battered
faithful to each tiny ritual.
Allowing everything to be as it is
trusting the nature of things.
My family is spending this Advent quite literally waiting for a baby.
My parents’ third grandchild was due yesterday, and our holiday preparations have been placed in brackets—will these be interrupted by a rush to the hospital? Will there be a newborn to adore?—everything is contingent in light of the impending event. There’s little point in planning when you’re waiting for the main event.
Last Saturday, I attended a funeral with James. And I thought of the death that awaits me and all those I love.
In both of these sorts of waiting—waiting for the inevitable—death, and waiting for the impossible—life—I find myself sinking deeper into the questions and answers of Advent.
I have been asking all sorts of questions this Advent, the sort of questions that come with December, darkness, and loss of daylight: Who am I? What am I? Am I good?
The sort of questions that exist in the darkness and yet lead toward the light. And I think it is quite something to realize that underneath the questions there is a fact I know that is more than enough for all of the questions: I know that God is love, and I am part of that. It doesn’t seem like a lot, in fact, when writing it down, it looks rather trite.
But, and perhaps this is what Advent is all about, when you feel words take root at the center of your soul, when truth is not just an idea bouncing on a screen but something that lives inside of you and colors the waking day and how you move in it, a light shines in the darkness.
You learn to love by loving, says a print above my prayer nook. But John tells us, and I think he’s right, we learn love because we are first and foremost loved.
This Advent, Catholic Artist Connection has been making its Instagram feed into an Advent Calendar. I’ve tried a thousand times to embed it into this post. Let’s see if it works.
Here’s a recent video! Check out the full calendar here. There are many lovely artists sharing the small moments of joy and gratitude they have found throughout their year. It’s a good perspective to have this holiday season.
Earlier this Advent, this piece came out in Sojourners. I had a great time reporting it, and a wonderful time writing it, and it is inspiring to see people trying to do the world the way the world was meant to be done and to make a better system than the one we’ve inherited.
Cooperatives are all around us. You may recognize the names of these cooperatives: Land O’Lakes butter, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Blue Diamond Growers, and REI.
Cooperatives, according to the International Cooperative Alliance, are businesses that are democratically run by the owners – one person, one vote. There are no majority owners. There are no outside shareholders. There are no hostile takeovers.
And many people of faith are turning to cooperatives as an alternative to the dehumanizing economics of capitalism.
“I’ve realized that the current state of economics is violence, since it violates human dignity,” said Dani Bodette, senior coordinator of Catholic Campaign for Human Development in Chicago. “But cooperatives are a form of nonviolence — they’re a nonviolent economics.”
Tell your friends that co-ops are the future! Don’t take it from me, let Pope Benedict XVI do the talking (hint: it’s in paragraph 66).
The Jesuits are creating an Advent Calendar of Jesuits! Check out my piece on my anti-nuclear hero, Pedro Arrupe, from this past Sunday.
We don’t expect regular people to be at irregular moments in history, and I don’t think I ever expected someone I expected to be as bougie and bureaucratic as a superior general of the Society of Jesus to have been on the ground at the greatest war crime ever committed.
It is quite a thing to have been at the epicenter of one of humanity’s greatest sins and live to tell the tale. (Not quite the epicenter geographically, for he’d be dead, but historically and dramatically right in the thick of it.)