advent for everyone - hope

Advent has always been perhaps my favorite time of year. I have a blue sweater that I especially saved to wear today for no reason other than to help make this first day of Advent feel as special as it is. I have loved the little things that make this time of year different: Christmas music, lights on houses, evergreen everywhere, peppermint and mulled cider and eggnog and cookies. I have loved the weekly themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. And between and above all of that I have loved the message of God with us, of hope incarnate, of divinity in a baby and of that baby in a manger. 

If you've been following my journey, you know things feel a little different now than they used to. Two years ago I spent my Advent season writing a daily devotional and prayer guide. This year I find myself not really praying, not really convinced of any of the religious or divine elements of the Christmas season. 

In many ways, that feels dark. Sometimes it can feel hopeless. 

And that's part of what I have loved most about Advent: it comes at the darkest time of the year and offers tiny beacons of light, embryonic thrills of hope. Can I still find that now? 

Hope. 

To hope is to wait, to believe there is something worth waiting for. In the journey of the last year or two, through layer after layer of Christianity seemingly pulled away, what has kept me going? What has been my hope, that thing that I still somehow deeply believe is worth waiting and searching and yearning for? 

My hope is still in Jesus. Not in the way I used to mean it. My hope is that this first century man - whether human or divine or both or neither - was someone worth following. The more I dig, the more his teachings still come up like water at the bottom of the well. I'm not looking to him for a get-out-of-hell-free card or a ticket into heaven. I'm not looking to him for miracles or even the relationship I so cherished. I am looking to him as someone who seemed to see a better way forward for all the humans on this earth. His message was to love, and that is worth my pursuit. That is much-needed light in darkness.

So this Sunday of Hope, I am reminded of the generations of humans who longed for light to dawn in a dark world, and I am just like them. They found hope through a man who was unlike anyone they had ever heard, and I am just like them. They told a story in which this man was born in the humblest of places because they yearned to see God in their very midst, and I am just like them. 

I will continue to hope. I see light breaking. I don't know what the light will expose in this darkness, but I am ready. 

The process of losing so much of my certainty has felt like heartbreak. It is breaking. But perhaps it is breaking like the dawn.