Advent as a Time for Waiting

Posted on December 4, 2023 by awtraughber

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  I’ve been writing about Advent off and on for over a decade, which points towards how resonant the idea of Advent is for me (particularly since I’m not a member of a liturgical church tradition).

As I understand it, Advent is the beginning of the church calendar, a time preceding Christmas where Christians remember the first coming of Jesus and anticipate his second.  While some churches fast during this time, many do not.  A number of churches, perhaps most especially those who have adopted the season from another tradition, treat it like a preamble to Christmas with a little bit of waiting, but not a lot.  And waiting is what I like most about the season.  Because waiting is a regular part of my life, and because waiting is difficult.  Consider these words from James K. A. Smith’s recent newsletter:

And so we turn, finally, to Advent. The long slog of ordinary time gives way to the focus of a season.The irony, of course, is that it is a season of waiting.

This year, I am particularly struck by how bad we are at waiting for God. Or at least how poorly I wait. This is not simply because of impatience, though that is certainly true. It’s also–maybe more so–because we seem to lack the capacity to recognize God’s arrival. God never shows up like those waiting would expect.

Smith continues:

We look for God in the extraordinary and God arrives incarnate in the mundane, even abject, hidden right before our eyes. We’re waiting and waiting and miss the fact that “God has taken place” perhaps because we keep scanning the horizons for meteoric arrivals. Or maybe because we’re too distracted. What if the arrival happened and we’re only still waiting because we couldn’t recognize it? Maybe what we’re waiting for is not the arrival but the healing of our attention so we might see where God has already taken place.

I think Smith is onto something here, but mainly because he’s putting into words some things that have been on my mind a lot lately.  Waiting has been a long-term theme for me that has taken on more importance these last few months as I reflect as a way for preparing for the future.  It’s also been something of a theme in a book or two that I’ve been reading over the last few months (one that I will get into more over the next few days).  All that to say: I think we all need to learn how to wait, and we need others to wait with us.  This should be something that Christians do extremely well, though I’m not sure how true that is in practice.  (I know it’s not as true of me as I would like.)

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Yesterday I was getting some grading done, so I brought up an Advent playlist that I had made back in 2019.  Present me was quite impressed with the song choice of past me.  The following song by Andrew Peterson, which is not technically an Advent song, struck me in the strong presence of waiting in the lyrics.  It doesn’t hurt that this concert version begins with a Lord of the Rings quote and comment.

Listening to it yesterday reminded me why I loved that song, and the album it is from, so much.

So here’s to Advent.  And here’s to learning to wait.

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“Made for People” Redux

Posted on November 30, 2023 by awtraughber

Back in August I wrote a few posts about Justin Whitmel Earley’s Made for People.  I enjoyed the book so much that I did a short seminar on it for some students at school a few weeks ago.  Instead of reading through parts of the book, we took some time to talk about some of the key points from the early points of this talk, taken from the Village Church:

It’s a good starter for a longer discussion, which I think the book deserves.  You never quote know what people walk away with after such a seminar, but I hope they hear something worth taking with them.

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“Full of a Beautiful Gloom”

Posted on November 29, 2023 by awtraughber

I’m not totally sure what to make of this recent Plough essay by Clare Coffey, but I know that I like a lot of it.  In the piece, Coffey tries to tackle the weird “vibe” that takes us through autumn, from Halloween through Thanksgiving, then from Advent to Christmas.  She begins her look at “spooky season” by talking about a couple of different approaches to traversing the time (either as “stickler badgers” or as “jolly hedgehogs”).  And then she talks some about the history of how people have understood the time (and how it shows up in songs and stories).  It’s a fun, colorful read, even if the colors are more muted than the bright colors of summer.

While the whole article is worth a read, here’s how she brings it to a close:

Christmas still bears some traces that mark its closure of the spooky season. There’ll be scary ghost stories / and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago, goes the song. And the most beloved piece of Christmas literature outside of scripture is in fact a ghost story. But as the bright lights twinkle through the season, any memory of shadows and hauntings dissipate into merriment, let the cold bite as it may.

That’s as it should be. Spooky season is almost over. Christmas is coming to kill it, thanks be to God. But for a few weeks more, I will indulge in the gloom and doom, the left hand of salvation history, before the lights go up.

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, which for many begins with the lighting of one candle.  Bit by bit, light by light, for sure.  This piece is a good reminder of that.

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The Doctor at Sixty

Posted on November 24, 2023 by awtraughber

It’s sobering to think that ten years have passed since “The Day of the Doctor.” But it has.  And a few hours from now, the first of three “60th Anniversary Specials” will drop on Disney+ (something else that is sobering to think about, really).  Even if it’s a temporary thing, David Tennant is back in the picture.  Here’s a scene shot with him for the recent Children in Need special.

In honor of the 60th anniversary, the BBC has put together this short video, which also gives us more of a glimpse at the next Doctor and companion.

And this is probably the best thing you could read to mark the occasion.  A good retrospective with an honest assessment of where things stand as another decade turns for the Doctor.

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On England and Scotland

Posted on October 30, 2023 by awtraughber

If you scroll down and look to the right, you’ll see that I’ve finally updated my Flickr account with a handful of pictures from my recent school trip to England and Scotland.  The trip was good, with an almost identical itinerary compared to our last trip, which was the fall before Covidtide.

I learned a lot logistically, particularly about the importance of group size and how packing out a day does an injustice to everywhere except the locations you visit in the morning.  Only one of our days was packed more than usual, but it felt like time to sit and relax was fleeting.  Part of that boils down to helping out those who get lost or who don’t feel well, which is understandable.  Part of it, maybe, was the group size.  And maybe familiarity has something to do with it?  Time will tell, I think.  I do look forward to looking back on the trip with fondness as time goes on.

One highlight of the trip was that we got to see a Shakespeare performance while in Stratford-on-Avon.  Last time, we also got to see a Shakespeare performance, but King John isn’t exactly considered “top tier Shakespeare.”  This time, we got to see Macbeth, which was quite good.  The play was set in a near-future dystopia, but you wouldn’t know it except for the costuming.  The acting was well-done; the staging was great.  You get the sense that they knew their audience would be tempted to nod off into sleep because of scenes with clanging pots and fire shooting up through the stage floor.  I will admit to almost nodding off a couple of times (though both times I caught myself).

There were other differences, of course.  One of our favorite hotels, which we have requested three times over the years, has not fully recovered from lockdowns and Covid.  For some reason (a seasonal thing, perhaps?) the actors that usually perform in the round at Shakespeare’s birthplace were not around (though they should be back by now).  Some consolation came for that loss with a reading of Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” by a local in Edinburgh.  The other big difference was the location of our last-night ceilidh dinner show.  At first we thought it was completely different from the performers from our last two trips.  The venue was much smaller, but the haggis tasted much better.  And, it turned out, the performers were almost exactly the same.  They did work in a set of more recent pop songs into all of their traditional Scottish fare, but I didn’t mind.  It’s always good to hear a rendition of the energetic music of the Proclaimers.

I’m grateful for the trip, always thankful for the opportunity to visit a beautiful place far away.  I could do without running to the gate (twice) in the Frankfurt airport, but I’m grateful that I made it both times.   I’m glad the trip happened, just like I’m glad to be on this side of it.  As the wall above the entrance to Skipton Castle states: desormais.

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Other fun moments:

  • As always, eating lunch at the Marks & Spencer cafe;
  • Having afternoon tea in Ambleside by Lake Windermere;
  • Getting a not-yet-released-in-America copy of Francis Spufford’s new book;
  • Sitting down to fish and chips in Skipton after not getting to do so twice elsewhere.

Biggest surprise of the trip: Doctor Who merchandise was almost impossible to find.  Finally found some in Edinburgh on the very last day.  It was almost eery how little anyone seemed to know about the Doctor.

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A Summary of Things

Posted on October 16, 2023 by awtraughber

Brad East, of Abilene Christian University, has a knack for observation and summary.  Case in point: today’s blog post titled “A Loosening.”  The premise?

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally.

He then goes on to write about eight particular areas of church life there things have “loosened.”  But he also acknowledges that this “loosening” has also happened simultaneously for multiple generations in a way that is quite striking (and potentially alarming).  It’s a good read, one that should leave us asking some good questions.

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The Possibility of Recovering Something Lovely

Posted on October 2, 2023 by awtraughber

We’re just under two months away from the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary adventure.  Crazy to think it’s been ten years since Tennant and Smith and Baker celebrated the 50th.  There’s a lot at stake in the 60th anniversary story, as Russell T Davies returns and brings Tennant and Catherine Tate along with him as an “in between” moment before the next Doctor takes over.  And Davies is telling the one story really left to tell from Tennant’s time: what happens if Donna Noble remembers her time traveling across space and time.  Here’s the trailer:

What’s also interesting to me is that as much as I enjoyed Tennant’s time as the Doctor, I didn’t always track well with RTD’s storytelling approach.  I was much more of a Moffat guy in that regard.  So it will be interesting to see how RTD does.  And I’ll also be interested in seeing how this all sets up the next Doctor, as I kind of lost interest with the last one (and I was a fan of Whitaker and Chibnall going into things).  The other factor to consider is the role that Disney will (or won’t) play into things.  I imagine the show will remain as smooth as the Chibnall years.  But maybe it can get back some of the frantic heart of the show that I felt was missing (even near the end of the Capaldi run, really).

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Staying True

Posted on August 28, 2023 by awtraughber

Last week I was talking to a co-worker about Made for People who then recommended to me Hua Hsu’s Stay True.  Stay True is a biographical account of college life for Hsu, who attended Berkley back in the 90s.  And while there are a lot of things going on in the narrative, the main thread is about Hsu’s friendship with a fellow student named Ken, who at some point in the narrative dies tragically.

Every now and then, Hsu writes about friendship in general, which dovetails nicely with Made for People (and why my co-worker suggested the book).  From early in the book:

There are many currencies to friendship.  We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh.  Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us.  There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night.  Some friends complete us, while others complicate us.  Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop.

He then goes on to quote Aristotle, which matches allusions to his three kinds of friendship (or at least two of them).  He goes on to say:

We learn as children that friendship is casual and transient.  As a structure, it’s rife with imbalance, invisible tiers, pettiness, and insecurity, stretches when we simply disappear.  For some, friendship needs to be steady and rhythmic.  For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left formant for years.

But before all that: a moment that brings you together.

I’m just short of halfway through the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography.  There are a few more riffs on friendship, particularly in relation to Derrida.  It’s a real slice-of-life memoir that captures something about pre-smart phone living that feels like a lifetime ago.  It’s not quite the same as Earley’s “covenant friendship,” but it definitely points to something good about life together.

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Fighting for Friendship

Posted on August 26, 2023 by awtraughber

As Aristotle tells it, there are three kinds of friendship: the pleasing friendship, the useful friendship, and the friendship pointed toward the good (see also Victor Lee Austin’s Friendship).  So friends that are fun, friends that help us get something that we want, and friends who key us towards a more virtuous life (see also Lewis’s The Four Loves).  In Made for People, Justin Whittle Earley goes deeper with the idea of the virtuous friend.

The crux of Earley’s “argument” in Made for People is what he calls covenant friendship.  Rooted in vulnerability and honesty, covenant friendship is the kind of friendship that makes “an audacious claim on the future.”  From a faith perspective, the future is key: “. . . despite the mess of our present circumstances, Jesus took at action to secure a future.  That future is not here yet, but the promise of it changes everything about the present!”

Earley does a quality job pointing out the differences between acquaintances/companions, convenient friendship, and marriage, particularly in relation to vulnerability, commitment, exclusivity, and sacrifice.  And while covenant friendship isn’t for every friendship, it is something worth always moving towards and working at.  Earley states:

Promising in friendship is a terribly dangerous business . . . Life is an ocean of uncertainty.  Friendship over the long haul is the same . . . So we might fairly wonder, with all this danger, why do it?

Because covenant takes messy things and makes them beautiful.  To promise friendship is to fight for an island of trust and stability in this ocean of uncertainty called life.

The rest of the book, then goes into the arts and habits that cultivate such a friendship.

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Beyond Sharing

Posted on August 25, 2023 by awtraughber

Yesterday I shared an initial post about Justin Whitmel Earley’s Made for People.  It’s not the first book from Earley that I’ve enjoyed.  A few years ago, The Common Rule captured the zeitgeist of the “routines and habits” emphasis (that seemed to flow out of James K. A. Smith’s work in Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love).  Earley is a great writer: he knows how to turn a phrase and bring a sense of practicality to deep and important things.  I wasn’t sure about picking up Made for People, though, as there have been quite a few (Christian) books about friendship out these last few years.  But when I saw it was down at the local Barnes & Noble, I decided to take the chance.  I’m really glad that I did. (And I highly encourage others to grab a copy and read a copy.)

One thing Earley does particularly well is how he walks the line between personal life and church life.  The two are never far removed, even when Earley is at his most personal.  After setting things up in the introduction via America’s loneliness epidemic and Jesus as the ultimate model of friendship (in multiple ways), Earley moves on to very intentional ways to “fight for friendship.”  The first is vulnerability.  Two things from the chapter stand out most to me.  First: Earley asserts that no one should be surprised when someone reveals themselves to be a sinner.  That’s a significant part of what it means to be human and to need forgiveness and reconciliation.  Earley writes:

This gets to the essence of what it means to live as a body of believers: living with one another in a way that mirrors how we live with Christ.

Being a sinner around others Christians, though, is one of the most difficult things to do.  It often feels like most churches aren’t built for that: they are more about “getting things done” than anything else.  And we don’t always have a good way of talking about “how we live with Christ” either, especially if the Christian life is more about “getting things done” like Martha instead of sitting at Jesus’ feet like Mary.

A second thing that I like from the chapter is Earley’s distinction between sharing and vulnerability:

Sharing is what we do to update people on our lives.  Vulnerability is what we do to let people into our lives.

What Earley calls “sharing” I often call “reporting.”  It’s much easier to share than to be vulnerable.  And you can’t be vulnerable with everyone (or just anyone).  But what Earley does so well is he calls you into the possibility of things.

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