I observe Advent every year. During this time I try to focus on the birth of Jesus while something tries, all too successfully, to turn my attention to eating, shopping, eating, lights, eating, parties, and eating. Now, I’m no Grinch. I love Santa, decorations, lights, parties and eating. But I also love Jesus, and it seems only right to save him a place at his own birthday party. So Dec. 2, I’m going to start focusing on the birth of Jesus. I don’t really have a plan, except to walk through Advent and watch. And I’m inviting you to come along.
I speak lightly of this struggle to focus, but it’s actually a serious matter. Something else always seeks to distract us, because Something Else is seeking to be born in us. Early in the 20th century the Irish poet (prophet) W. B. Yeats, saw this as a misty apparition. “Advent!”, he cried, “Advent! Watch for what is coming!!!”
The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi*
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
* Spirit of the World
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