Finding Christ in Me

1^st Sunday of Advent; Romans 13:11-14

It is now the hour for you to wake from sleep.

I don’t know if it is because I ran a business for almost three decades or its some other reason, but I am not one to look back. What’s done is done and there is nothing I can do to change it. I find that I am one who is constantly looking forward to the next thing. We’ll be on our way home from a fantastic vacation, and I’m already thinking about where we should go next. It drives her crazy.

Its not that I’m not grateful for what has transpired. I love looking at pictures and videos of our past trips. I can spend hours going through old photographs of when I was younger or of when our kids were growing up. I am so thankful for all that I have and what I have been able to see and do in my lifetime. It’s just that I have no desire to go back and do it all over again. It was a magic time when our boys were babies. Go back and do it again? Not a chance.

Advent is a time to look ahead. We look ahead and look forward to the celebration of Christmas and the incarnation of Christ into our world. Emmanuel – God With Us. But over the millennia, Advent has become over sentimentalized and certainly commercialized. The world focuses on Christmas Day as if it were a birthday party for a baby boy. We buy gifts (lots of gifts) to share the joy of an event that occurred 2,000+ years ago.

In reality, Advent is meant to be a time to slow down and reflect on Emmanuel. God with us. God with me. I need to look forward and use this time for self-reflection and self-awareness. Thomas Merton says, “Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you?” I have too much clutter in my mind preventing me from focusing on Emmanuel. I have to wake from a self-imposed slumber [Romans 13:11] to focus on God In Me.

I admit this may sound a bit selfish. But in reality, it is not. Advent is a time to look forward and to refocus myself and to recall what it is that Jesus called me to do and be. There is far too much suffering, devastation, injustice, isolation, violence, and poverty in our world to keep treating Advent as a sentimental season focused on “an infantile Jesus or an infantile gospel,” as Richard Rohr describes it. I need to reconnect with my soul and find Emmanuel, God In Me. That, I believe, is what Advent is about.

Kelly Isola writes, “Because it has nothing to do with a particular date on a calendar, and everything to do with me, Advent is always arriving. Frankly, it has everything to do with ALL of us being “Emmanuel,” being God with us. Through the listening for my name at the stones of my walls, by emptying myself of what I think I know, and surrendering to whatever darkness there may be, and moving through that darkness with my fellow humans into an ever-expanding, healing, joy-filled light – I glorify humanity.” And I glorify God.

Every Day.