Second-Week-of-Advent Calendars 2015

Dec 14, 2015

Advent gives me the chance to reencounter the lush, dynamic vocabulary of the Christian tradition. The words on my round-sticker calendar are like old friends who are familiar yet always new. Like words in Scripture they are not stagnant. They reveal something new about themselves each time I spend time with them. It would be easier to think they have a single definition and once I’ve learned it, my work is done. But that would be putting a choke chain on what the words have to say to me or what God has to reveal to me through them. The Christian faith is not summed up in a set of one-dimensional, unchanging words.

A line from the Billy Collins poem called Introduction to Poetry comes to mind. Billy Collins describes his students’ way of dealing with poetry: “…all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.” Like poems, we can try to pin down the words of our faith or we can spend a lifetime with them and slowly marinate in the expansive beauty of their height, depth, and breadth. IMG_3497

Below is my friend Cindy’s first two weeks of Advent in word and drawing. Cindy described her experience of using Advent calendars in the December 3 post on my blog. Mostly Markers is Cindy’s blog about “drawing, doodles, and a few words.” Cindy Two-Week Avent Calendar 2015 Resized

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