Just a Breath Away

Rev. Millie Rochester

November 30, 2008

Like a lot of us, I have a collection of poetry. I don’t know the author of this one, but it’s apropos:

Between holidays let us pause.

Thanksgiving has given us cause

on faith, hope, love, joy, patience to call,

as Advent does upon us fall.

Caring for details great and small,

let us stop to reflect and to recall

the deeper focus of the season

that sharing gives us reason.

Signs of the season are all around:

lights, ads, songs and sounds abound,

but in our hearts, our spirits soar,

knowing love is the season's core.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent - the four weeks before Christmas. Advent, which is Latin for "a coming or arrival," is a time when Christian churches re-enact the wait for a Savior, in preparation for Christmas. Just down the street from us, the Nazarene Church does this with a live drive-through nativity pageant. We don't subscribe to the same beliefs of that congregation, of course, but at this time of year I'm especially mindful that Unitarians and Universalists both emerged from Christianity.

For the first Christians, these weeks before Christmas were when converts prepared themselves for baptism, through prayer, reflection, fasting and instruction. The process could take as long as six weeks - about forty days - the same length of time Jesus is said to have spent in the wilderness preparing for his ministry.

During the middle ages, when many people were convinced of the imminent return of Jesus, Advent became a time to prepare for judgment and eternal rewards. Since around the sixth century, the meaning of Advent has been expanded to include the whole preparatory season in the sense the word is used today, minus the more modern material commercialism.

The advent candles, an additional one lit each week, symbolize faith, hope, joy, and love. Patience is associated with the wreath that surrounds the candles. We lit the candle of "faith" today, but for me, hope is the compelling feature of Advent.

More than 200 years ago, the humanist philosopher and author William Hazlitt observed, "Humans are the only animal that laughs and weeps; for we are the only animal that is stuck in the difference between what is and what could be."

The concept of Advent can fill that in-between space. Lighting the candles is a ritual that expresses forward thinking - not only religiously, but in embracing the universal condition: the way we live in relationship with one another and the universe, especially in the ambiguous "in-between" times. We really are, after all, always in such times: in anticipatory mode, waiting for some thing or some event the future holds, whether near or far away.

Most children can tell us we're between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We adults are mindful of other ways that we are in between: the election and the inauguration; this devastating economic slump and a longed-for recovery; in the larger sense, we are between life and death.

While we all live in the present, we know at the same time that we're poised at the edge of the future. And here's where hope comes in. We must embody hope, for if we declare that the waiting is over, if we decide that we are not "in between," but at "the end," we will probably be right. And so we build our faith in the future on hope, and prepare as if our preparation matters, for our future truly is only a breath away. Human and divine resources available to us call for an attitude of ultimate optimism, as the great Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams observed.

We can't know what to expect tomorrow or what news we'll see when we pick up the morning paper - terrorist attacks, bank failures, poverty, disease...and that's just the public news. Personally, we may be struggling with illness, depression, the threat of job loss, or home foreclosure.

But we have to hope that we can make the world and our personal circumstance a better place. We have to hope that even when all seems lost, we can transform our lives into a rich and meaningful existence, and we have to hope that the communities and relationships that we try to nourish will blossom and grow. Hope sees beyond whatever the immediate circumstance may be, into a world that could be, guiding us in the process of transformation.

In a novel from the 19th century, citizens of a Welsh village gather at church on Christmas Eve to pray. Then, singing carols and hymns along the way, they walk down a country path to an old abandoned stone shack and continue their prayers. They believe that if everyone in the village is there praying with sufficient faith at the midnight hour, they will witness the Second Coming. The myth has endured for 500 years, and still everyone shows up for the ritual.

In the story, one resident is asked whether he really believes this myth. "No," he says, shaking his head sadly, "not really."

"Well, then why do you do this year after year?"

"Because," he answers, 'what if I'm the only one who isn't there when it matters?"

This is not the answer of someone steeped in faith, but there is a germ of hope - a miracle might occur, and he doesn't want to be the one who precludes that from happening.

Unitarian Universalist minister John Taylor, in his book Notes on an Unhurried Journey, says that Advent is a season of "affirming that something good is going to happen, and it is going to happen to us...If we don't expect good things to happen, it is almost certain that they won't. If, however, we expect the wonderful and prepare ourselves for it, there is a good chance that our expectations will be fulfilled."

"If there were no advent," according to Taylor, "we would need to invent it. We human creatures, in spite of all that has happened to us and been done by us, are still hopeful. Something new, something vital, something promising is always coming, and we are always expecting. Thus in Advent candles are lighted to mark the time of preparation, and with each new light our anticipation grows - as it should. We are, after all, a hopeful people."

Hope, exhilaration, loneliness, despair, love, joy - so many emotions are made manifest if we allow ourselves the luxury of discernment. Such awareness is an invitation to religious growth, for accepting hope, love and joy does not mean loneliness and despair don’t exist, only that those aspects of life can be overcome.

An in-between time offers us an opportunity to be more discerning about what we pay attention to in life, an opportunity to be awake to what is around us, to be open to unexpectedly positive possibilities that might be revealed - a time of reflection, focused watchfulness - living in the present, not only in anticipation of what is yet to come.

A story comes to my mind, of two fish swimming along. They meet an older fish swimming the other way. He nods at them, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The two young fish swim along for a while longer. Eventually, one of them looks at the other and says, "What the hell is water?"

We are living in eternity now, just as fish live and swim in water. Eternity is a paradox - the paradox of living in the moment and anticipating the future. What we do with the time we have matters. The words of Amy Carole Webb's song On Holy Ground ring true - "If life is a journey, between birth and death, then every step we take matters, and every breath..."