Seasonally Affected
From 1 December
Winter in Minnesota - Dec 2005
Advent started on Sunday. I celebrated the start of the liturgical season and the new church year with a family here in Petaling Jaya. During the four weeks preceding Christmas the extended members of this oversized family all get together to share in a meal on Sunday night followed by a short time for prayer, devotion, and the lighting of the advent wreath. It is a tradition started by a father as his life was drawing close and that has continued on in the decades following his passing. The evening I shared with them was fill with joy and warmth and laughter.
As part of being/doing the pastor-thing, I was called on to give the short Advent reflection that night and found myself at a lack of words . . . seasonally and liturgically adrift.
The language and texts and symbols of Advent (at least those that I'm familiar with and that are practiced here) have to do with the flickering lights of hope, peace, joy, and love in the face of growing darkness or the warmth of promised and incarnate grace standing in opposition to icy cold storms of judgment and threatened damnation.
At home in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Connecticut or in my familial homelands of Denmark, Germany, and Britain this all makes sense - the Word bound in language and symbols matches the temperament and temperature of the World into which it is proclaimed. The season within the church reflects and is reinforced by the season without.
Here in Malaysia, with the constant heat and humidity that makes the tropics more or less timeless, I sense a disconnect. The Liturgical language speaks of growing darkness and yet the sun still rises and sets around 7:10 AM and PM. The cold and the death that are ushered in with the first deep freeze are far removed physically, psychologically, and spiritually - replaced by repeating cycles of same-ness.
This felt disconnect reminds me, in broad strokes, of how deeply Christendom's historic centering in the Global North has affected its worldwide patterns of worship and its ways of ordering time. How coincidental is it that Advent coincides with Europe's longest nights and shortest days or that the Rebirth of Easter is accompanied by new shoots of grass springing up and budding flowers bursting open?
At times lately I've been 'geeking out' and wondering what might have been if the Church's patterns of worship were equatorial in orientation . . . how might the cyclical same-ness of the tropical environment be reflected the church calendar? or if it was a Southern phenomenon . . . would our seasons be completely reversed? as the Church continues to expand and center itself in the experience of the Global South, might there come a time when this shift in geographical space would demand a shift in liturgical time?
More immediately, and more practically, my challenge is to translate the tradition into this climate and this context and (more importantly) to discover how people in this place at this time speak of and prepare for the One who came, who does come, and who will come again.
Comments
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Dear Friends and Family,
Advent is my favorite liturgical season. As the nights become longer, we hunker down deeper into our homes and out blankets. We light
candles on the Advent wreath, a ring of light increasing as the weeks go by: a protest against the dark, a way to say, “There is a light that will not be overcome.”
For Lutherans, the color for the season of Advent is blue, dark blue like the sky just before dawn. It is the blue of expectation, the blue of hope. Eating dinner in the dark, walking under the early
stars: this our practice of waiting and watching. This is how we celebrate our expectation of the imminent.
But today, on the southern skirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia in the third week of Advent, we are planting a garden at the church. The produce will support the comedor, the low-cost lunch program for neighborhood kids. Over the last few weeks, the rains have begun to come, and we have broken up the hard earth of the church yard, turned and sifted, amended with manure. We built a fence of chicken wire to keep out the hens who live on the church grounds. Weeks ago we planted tomatoes in cut off 2-lilter coke bottles and grew starts that are now blooming yellow. We collected seeds for squash, chard, onions, and peas. And today, with the kids in our after-school program now on summer vacation, we will plant the garden.
This is Advent in the southern hemisphere. This is how we wait and watch. This is how we expect the imminent: the seed cracking open, the hummingbird hovering. . .
What do we do until the Lord comes? We plant the fields. We wait for rains to come. We watch for buds and blooms, signs of the sustaining fruits of the earth. We expect abundance. Advent is not the season of light in the darkness, but the season of seeds in the earth, of eggs cracking open. It is the season for Birds of Paradise, for figs, and for lemons.
Until the Lord comes, we plant the fields. We watch the earth for signs of hope, for evidence that God is with us.
When Catholicism first came to the Andes, the missionaries tried to explain the incarnation to the Andean people. The people thought the
missionaries were crazy, not for thinking God would come to earth, but for thinking God wasn’t here before. Of course the earth is charged
with the holy. Of course God dwells among us.
Christians believe that God loves the world, that God has given Godself to humanity freely, completely, has taught us of love and
power through figs trees, mustard seeds, and lost sheep, comes to us in food and drink, calls us into one Body, blessed and broken. The
Andean people believed this long before the Spanish priests arrived in black robes. They did not know Jesus, but they knew Emmanuel, they
knew the one who was in the beginning with God, through whom all things came and come into being.
Their Christianity has Andean roots, not Jewish ones. And so, in Advent, they do not wait for the long expected Messiah, branch of the root of Jesse’s tree. They wait for the baby in whom the already imminent God can be held and welcomed, brought into their homes, out of the heat. And until the Lord comes, they plant the fields, watch
the rain, and wait in the shade of broad leafed fig trees for the arrival of what they know is already here.
For me, Advent will always be a season of light in darkness, of honeyed wicks lit in the windows of the house. It will always be for me a season in which to hunker down, to celebrate hope in the longest nights of the year. But maybe, maybe in the future I will change my Advent wreath, replacing one blue candle with an orange one: orange like the Bird of Paradise, orange like squash blossoms, orange like pollen, orange like Advent in the southern hemisphere.
Peace,
Mary Emily and Jason