It’s Advent. It’s the end of an unusually tough calendar year. It’s the beginning of a new liturgical year for the church. It will also soon be a new calendar year.
Advent is a season pregnant with hope. It’s a liminal time of watching, waiting, and wondering (this year’s theme for vespers). It’s a time of preparation, nesting, joy, anticipation and also stress, dread, overdoing, and loneliness.
If Advent is a season of watching, waiting, and wondering, I feel like I’ve been living in Advent for a long while, well before this calendar year started. Or the one before. I’ve been in an in-between time, that liminal time between the end of one thing, or almost the end, and the start of another. This in-between time can take the shape of leaving a job and starting a new one or being in the midst of searching for a new one. Or it can be a time between receiving bad news and finally getting some good news. Liminal time and space can take on different forms.
In another form, it’s an interior liminal space. A time of soul searching, watching things unfold, paying attention to nudges and pulls, waiting for the questions to reveal their answers and preparing to be ready to receive them. That’s been my Advent of over two years.
Questions I’ve been pondering, decisions that have hung in the air, waiting for an answer or a sense of direction…these things have been evolving over this time. Wonderings of place, purpose, and “now what” have been accompanied by watchful waiting and an inner alertness.
Quite some time ago, a friend sent me a portion from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, not even this much of it I don’t think:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
It seems as if I’ve been living the questions for these past 2+ years. Not that I’m sure what living a question actually looks like. But more and more I’ve come to let some questions just linger, staying alert for what pulls and nudges my spirit, and noticing the Spirit’s movements and promptings. It would appear that an aspect of living the questions is discerning. Over time, you begin to connect the dots, and you realize that the answers to the questions were unfolding and continue to do so. The realization comes about by being alert, being watchful, and waiting. At times I imagine the answers being revealed in a way similar to the image of a path unfolding and coming into view as I walk, complete with diverging paths requiring that watchful waiting and discernment.
It’s Advent. It’s a season pregnant with questions, wonderings, possibilities. And answers that will be revealed if we pay attention. Maybe we should be living more in such a time of pondering and alertness, listening to that still small voice deep within, trusting the whispered “come and see.” Maybe more of our lives are really periods of Advent. What questions are you watchfully awaiting an answer to? What invisible finger is tapping on your heart and pointing you to the answer?
May you have a blessed Advent filled with an alertness and watchfulness towards your deepest ponderings and longings. And may you not be afraid to simply let the questions reveal their answers as you are ready.
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