With Advent just over a week away now, Advent resources are beginning to appear online, including Christine Sine’s New Advent Meditation and planned synchroblogs. I organized a synchroblog last year for Advent, and have collected all the post links for reference as well. I’ve also begun to reread some of my past posts for the season, like Bethlehem and Mixing metaphors, and Kicking your way to the Light. There are also collections of Advent resources appearing online as well.

I’m starting to think on these themes just a little, as the SBT Book of Hours project is getting underway. Oddly enough, Lent was subscribed pretty quickly, with Christmas and Advent falling behind. I didn’t have any particular leaning and offered to fill in where necessary, so drew Vespers during the Christmas season as a result. There’s still an opening left under Advent, so I’m considering that too.

In reading about our love of the darkness, I was struck by the way that some of us gravitate more toward seasons like Lent than to Advent. I wonder why this might be… is it that we’re more comfortable considering our own brokenness and mortality than we are considering the coming of Christ the King? Is it another way in which we love the darkness — being in some way more comfortable with introspection? I don’t have an answer, but I’m beginning to mull over many of these themes and ideas and the way they interweave with one another.

A couple of years ago, I sketched a concept for a project to build a little wooden manger that we would assemble as families with the kids in our small group. At someone else’s suggestion, the pieces of wood were designed to fit together and be taken apart — and so that they could be assembled in a different way to form a cross at Easter time. Yet one more reminder of the way these seasons of our calendar are intricately woven together, and inseparably connected.

I am struck by the connection between Advent and Lent, both seasons of darkness, periods of waiting leading up to a more joyful holiday that celebrates the life of Jesus in some way, forming the markers of his life at either end… each in some way, even with difficulty at times, resisting the season to which they lead up.