Beginning when my children were about three years old, I began getting them an Advent calendar. I remember that year they were three I thought they might be old enough to understand a little bit about waiting for baby Jesus to get born. And all went well. We opened the doors each night to reveal sweet, chubby angels and shepherds and sweet, chubby manger animals with smiles on their faces. The final door revealed the sweetest and chubbiest baby Jesus lying on a bed of hay. As I have mentioned to some of you before, the problem was that Jesus was pictured with a bright yellow halo around his head, leading one of my children – I can’t remember which one – to ask brightly why baby Jesus had a plate on his head. As I have also mentioned, I failed utterly, being a tired minister/mother during the Christmas season and not equal to the challenge of trying to explain the concept of the incarnation to three-year-olds. So I told them the halo was a yellow hat. I think this was the first time I was completely theologically perplexed by my children, though it has certainly not been the last.

A couple of years ago they discovered that Trader Joe’s sells Advent calendars with pieces of chocolate behind the little doors, so of course that is what they are now desperate for. They start asking for the chocolate calendar in early October. At first I insisted on a religious themed calendar to go along with the chocolate one but then I realized it didn’t matter. They already know the story of Jesus getting born and they seem to be able to hold that story alongside the one about Santa and the elves. The important part of the Advent calendar for them is the expectancy, the counting of the days. But mostly, the part they love is the experience of opening all those tiny doors. And I think this is a good way for all of us to think about Advent, as a time for searching for tiny doors and then opening them. Advent is a time for opening doors, doors which reveal a glimpse of something, a small bit of a picture, a tiny bite of sweetness, doors which open into rooms we have not been in before, or rooms we have not visited for a very long time.

Advent is the time in the Christian liturgical year of the four weeks of waiting before Christmas; it is the time of waiting for the infant Jesus to be born. In Christian theology, it is through Jesus that God chose to incarnate, to become fully human and enter the world. In our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, we focus on two aspects of the story: we focus on the adult that Jesus grew up to be and on the message of radical, inclusive love that he brought into the world. We also focus on the possibility of each human being bringing holiness into the world. We imagine each one of us as an incarnation, so to speak. Each one of us has that same divine spark within us. This is why we ask parents of the babies in our congregation to hand them over to play the baby Jesus in our Paper Bag Nativity Pageant. We could use a doll and, if there is crying, we hand the real baby back to her or his parents and substitute the plastic baby because no one should suffer for the Christmas Pageant. But real babies are best. They are best because it is good for us, important for us, to see those babies getting older and to think, “oh, last year Hugh was Jesus.” Or, “oh, remember when Zoe was small enough to be baby Jesus and look at her now!” In other words, baby Jesus is all of our children. Baby Jesus is all of our children because all of our children are holy, full of truth and grace and wisdom and able to change the world for the better.

So Advent is the time of waiting and of preparing ourselves for this ancient story to unfold again. It is the time for stillness, for pondering as we are told the young girl Mary pondered when she learned of her strange and surprising pregnancy. Advent is the time for standing at the window, for watching the sky at dawn and sunset and for coming to know something about our own deep yearnings, about the quiet, stirrings deep within our own hearts. These things are gentle and subtle. They are hard to hear above the noise and busyness of most of our daily lives. Sometimes I wonder if it is the fear of stillness, the fear of waiting and pondering that has led to the almost mass hysteria of the holiday season in our culture. Just when our bodies seem to want to go into hibernation, just when we yearn to become quiet and reflective and go to bed early, we are invited into this frenzy of shopping and decorating and parties and noise and activity. To me, this is strangely at odds with the purpose of Advent. It seems like all the lights and parties would be much better later on – in February for example – when we have started doubting that the winter will ever end and the snow is grey and dirty and piled up everywhere. Advent needs quiet and time for reflection and I urge you to find some of it, however you can.

I think often these days of the beautiful words by Rainer Maria Rilke: I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend and understood. [from Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy]

The poet Theodore Roethke writes, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” [from In a Dark Time]. What it is that our eyes might begin to see if we let them adjust to the dark? What might we begin to see or hear or feel if we took the invitation that Advent offers us into stillness and quiet, if we didn’t run so quickly from the darkness and silence and what might be waiting for us there. What would happen if, instead, we searched for our own tiny Advent doors and opened them? What glimpse of holiness, of mystery, of sweetness might we find? What picture might be revealed to us in tiny fragments?

The poet and visual artist Jan Richardson keeps a blog every Advent full of her original images and poetry inspired by the stories and scripture of the season. In her first entry for this year she writes, “So today, we begin with a door, and with a blessing. As you stand on the edge of Advent, here at the door, what do you hope for the season ahead? How will you keep yourself – your eyes, your ears, your heart – open for [the Holy] who has been waiting for you?” Jan Richardson writes:

Jan Richardson says, and I deeply believe this is true, that the mark of a true blessing is that it will take you somewhere unexpected, somewhere you did not think to go on your own. Blessings appear in strange and unexpected disguises as well. They come in all sorts of forms – as dreams and invitations, children, visitors, love, holiday cars, poems and old songs. Sometimes they wear the face of loss, change, even death.

“Say the thing that / you most need / and the door will open wide / and by this word the door is blessed / and by this word / the blessing is begun … and all the rest will come.” What is the blessing you yearn to receive this year? What is the blessing you yearn to give to another? What is the thing you most need to say and have not yet said? What is the shape of this blessing, the sound of it, the feel of it? Several years ago the blessing I received was when my children fell in love with our Christmas tree. They named the tree Green and their passion for Green grew daily. They took turns feeding it cups of water in the morning and evening. We learned that Isabel, like all the women in my family, has a tendency to overfeed. They sang songs to Green and told it Good Morning and Good Night with great sweetness. They discovered, don’t ask me how, that Green was a girl and that Green liked to kiss so they held their round cheeks up to the branches for kisses and then kissed the branches back. The tenderness of all of this practically broke my heart, especially since I was acutely aware of what my children had not yet realized – that Green’s life span was going to be pretty short. And because I am a mother who worries, I worried about the pain of goodbye. What was so interesting was that when the time came for Green to be, how shall we say, cremated on the town’s bonfire pile, the kids were completely and utterly fine.

The blessing for me that year was in the learning that I always want to hold onto what is not graspable. I always want things to stay even though I know that love, joy, beauty, grace, all of these things are not permanent. We inevitably lose things and people we adore. And yet, if we want to be fully alive, fully human, we will need to love. We will need to risk over and over. We will need to open the doors that present themselves to us and move through those doors to receive our blessing, even though we never know how things will end. Even though we never know where everything will lead, even though we can’t see the whole picture, and even if we do get to see it, the picture is always changing.

One of the poets of our own congregation, Melinda Green, writes about the lessons she has learned from the Advent calendar this way:

May each one of us seek and open the doors of this Advent season. May we say the thing we most need and see the door before us open wide. And from this all the rest will come, that we might be blessed and that we might also be a blessing in these days of waiting.