Shoved to Them
Suddenly, it’s Advent. Where has the year gone in such a hurry? Every year we make a New Year’s Resolution to slow down, and each year we break it in a flurry of work, children’s activities, and a wishful impression of a social life. The days seem to rise and whirl faster and faster until we reach the blur that is the Christmas season only to collapse, exhausted, on December 26th. We remain motionless and near comatose until New Year’s Eve breaks us from our somnolence, and we begin the whole maddening dash of living once more.
I keep asking myself if it’s always been this way. Is this just how the years go for adults? Because I remember during my childhood when Advent wasn’t the signal to sprint to the finish, but the beginning of time slowing down. Advent signaled the start of a slow and graceful dance to Christmas Eve. Those December days would stretch out before us in preparation and play. We went caroling and baked cookies. We made my mother’s famous soft caramels and shared them with friends and neighbors. I have so many memories of the Decembers of my childhood, and what stands out the most to me, as a mom on this side of 40, is the slowness and the peace.
I don’t think the way it is now is the way it was then. I think we’ve lost something of the wonder of this Season in our modern age. We live in a world where nothing stops and there is no true rest. Cell phone give us instant and immediate access to each other, and in our connected-ness we have lost solitude. Social media and 24-hour news cycles mean that there is no escape from the tragedies of the day. The sufferings of strangers half a world away are omnipresent, and in our awareness there is no place for peace. We have lost the ability and the space to find silence, and tethered to our electronic leashes, we have lost our connections to each other.
And suddenly, it’s Advent. And I wonder if we even know what that means any longer, and if it still means anything at all.
We’ve entered into a time of joyous expectancy in a world that no longer knows what it means to wait. We’re living in a world of instant gratification and trying to understand what it means to anticipate. The carols sing of a world which “in silent stillness lay” to a world where silence rarely enters.
I think we’ve lost something beautiful in our loss of silence and something magical in our loss of anticipation.
And I keep wondering how do we find that which is nowhere around us. Where do we even begin to look? If the Voice of God is in the whisper, is my family’s life too loud for us to hear it?
After much prayer, thought, and discussion; my husband and I have decided to change how our family celebrates Advent this year by reclaiming silence. We are going to begin by unplugging ourselves and our children and turning off the screens as much as is possible. My husband works in IT, I write, my children use the computers and movies to supplement their schoolwork; so completely cutting the cord won’t work for us. What we hope will work is banning all screens on the weekends and in the evenings once my husband is home. The exception being watching movies as a family – movies that we have planned to watch, not whatever we land on as we channel surf in our boredom.
We are hoping that in introducing silence to our household, we will reintroduce ourselves to each other and to the wonder of Advent. What we want for Christmas is the gift of time with our children before they are grown and on to raising their own families, and a chance to live Advent as it was meant to be lived – a holy time of preparation, expectation, and joy.
We are struggling to find for our family a world where silent stillness lays, and so we are taking a pregnant pause from the noise and confusion to focus ourselves on what ought to be really important – our family and that Holy Infant so tender and mild.
Advent Wreath By Jürgen Howaldt (Own work (selbst erstelltes Foto)) [CC BY-SA 2.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons
Madonna and Child by Johann Ender [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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