Strange Space

Usually I am ready, oh-so-ready, for Advent. We had an early-ish Easter and an extra Sunday after Thanksgiving.  I recognize that it has been "ordinary time" for far too long and I am ready to raise a glass and toast the first Sunday of Advent, which is the New Year for liturgy geeks.

Everything starts fresh in Advent: Lectionary readings, sanctuary colors and installations  worship songs and worship words come around again. They arrive, not with the shock of strangeness but as familiar friends we haven't seen in a long time.

And there's an obvious cultural subversion to practicing Advent rightly.  The whole world is bustling with self-assigned goodness: baking, gift buying and wrapping, holiday feasts, decorating, entertaining, crafts.  Meanwhile the church slows itself.  Holiday traffic whips around us but we respect the restraints of human speed limits. So I like the "haha! You won't catch me going crazy this time of year" sensibility that Advent, rightly practiced, provides.

Yet, this year, ordinary time has been far-from-ordinary.  I came in touch with the DC CRC during Holy Week. I had an interview the week before Pentecost and was planning a visit to DC within a month.  My ordinary time (to say nothing of DC CRC's experience) this year was filled with the pathos of wondering, uncertainty, expectation, longing, anticipation.  The call was extended and we waited. The call was received and we waited. I said goodbye to my loved ones in Kalamazoo while the congregation in DC patiently waited. I drove into town and waited. My moving truck arrived and even then we waited.

It was only a month ago this coming Sunday that I was installed as Pastor at DC CRC.  It was last week that my kitchen was finished, last weekend that I finally organized the last room (the basement) of the parsonage.  This morning I was still hanging things and re-arranging my office at church. Life in DC is still strange.  Ordinary appears only in snatches between the clouds of newness and the fog o' strange.

So, here we are.  Just beginning. It finally feels like time to engage, not time to wait. But now the Almighty Church Calendar tells us that we ought to slow down again and wait and be still and do that counter-cultural thing of NOT going crazy this year.  But, if I'm honest, the effort to not go crazy this year might actually cause me to go a little bit crazy.

I'm just looking for a little more Ordinary Time because we've been living Advent for the past 7 months! I don't have an answer or solution to my soul's hesitations.  I'd be happy to hear any homemade remedies you feel appropriate to prescribe.

In the meantime, I'll begin my preparations for Sunday and see what the Holy Spirit can do for us here.