This is the time of year when we all look at each other and murmur our annual astonishment that we can’t believe it’s Advent already. It’s the time of year I have my traditional, curmudgeonly outburst (like clockwork right before Thanksgiving) about how annoyed I am about Christmas music already being played in the supermarket and shake my head, wounded to the heart, that the neighbors have had Christmas trees displayed for weeks already in their front windows. The annual rite of complaint isn’t a healthy or commendable tradition, but its mine.
At the closing of the year, Advent offers a touchstone, a sort of anchor for the memory. This is the time of year we remember best. Family photos from holidays past are some of my favorite to linger over because the memories are so alive, almost like those celebrations are still happening. There’s something about preparing for Christmas that’s always fresh. For the umpteenth time, we drag the lights out of the box in the basement, set up the tree, start baking, go ice skating, and light up our Advent wreaths, but the process never gets old.
Ornaments commemorate important events in the family. The tree becomes a canvas to display births, engagements, and first communions. All of life -- past, present, and future -- spreads out before us.
The cyclical nature of time presses home with particular force during Advent. Liturgically, it’s the season that binds the rest of the year together. Celebrating the Advent of Our Lord at Christmas and also looking forward to his Advent at the end of time, we find that time is bending back around on itself. What we had thought was a straight line, a counting up of years as we age, is actually a circling round. Memories have vitality and heft, the seasons flow past once again like a turning wheel, traditions brace us against the cold winter and deliver us back to our beginnings.
Maybe that’s the magic of it all. Repetition is unveiled as a great mystery. Tradition is life. From the cycling of the seasons, we emerge newborn. Advent traditions feel cozy and warm but, in fact, each time they cycle around, the magic of it all pries open a door into eternity. We risk an apocalypse. The circle isn’t quite what it seems, and maybe it’s in the very act of circling that we discover our way forward.
Every Advent, my mind coheres around these kinds of thoughts. I’m starting to feel my age. Each Advent, my children are changing. Boyfriends are starting to show up at family events with my older daughters. There’s now an ornament on the tree announcing an impending marriage for one of them. If the liturgical calendar has brought us back to this place, to gather round the tree and bake and laugh and prepare for the arrival of the Christ Child, each time we gather we are different. The creativity of it is palpable. We are orbiting through this world, its struggles and happiness, even as Our Lord is on his way to remake it -- and remake us.
Bent into orbit
St. Hildegard, in her mystical visions, saw the universe as a kind of round egg. Circular and contained, it’s ready to burst. Its bounded nature harbors growing life. The cosmos is vibrating. One almost gets the sense that, at the heart of it all, the very center of everything, in that still, peaceful place at the axis of the whirlwind, it would be appropriate to discover a mother and child. Perhaps the child is in his crib, a stone enclosure reminiscent of an altar, and his mother is watching him. Outside, the universe is holding its breath. Angels have circled round. The animals quietly watch. All the hurrying motion of the seasons slipping past pauses for a moment. Pure anticipation. Something is about to happen. The egg is already cracking open.
In one of her visions, St. Hildegard sees endless choirs of angels gathered in concentric circles around God’s throne. His love is emanating from the center. His love is birthed in us. We’re encircled by it. His love is gravity and we’re bent into orbit. The patterns of our lives aren’t useless repetitions, they’re the enactment, again and again, of the love which makes us.
I know that life can sometimes seem an endless round of doing the same things. Wake up, go to work, make dinner, watch television. Wait for the weekend. Rinse and repeat. Even the things we appreciate can feel repetitive – coffee with friends, Sunday Mass, yet another Advent, yet another Christmas.
There’s tension between time envisioned as a circle and time as a straight line. St. Hildegard feels it, and within all the cycles she also apprehends a “Cosmic Tree.” The tree grows, like any tree, in a straight line. It’s an upwards moving principle.
We might be circling, but we are ascending. The circle spirals up the axis and with each revolution we’re a little closer to Heaven. Each Advent, we’ve advanced closer to God. Each time we make our preparations, share our love at the holidays, begin to gather to the Nativity, we are moving higher. And the best part is, because the repetitions gather up the entirety of our lives, we aren’t leaving behind anything or anyone. It’s all encircled by love.
