They are two seasons that occur at the same time, the liturgical season called Advent and the secular season called the Holidays. Advent falls during the darkest days of the year, when the earth is barren and we await the birth of a child who will bring eternal light to the world. It is a time to prepare for what is coming, to purify ourselves through fasting and meditation. The Holidays arrive at the same time of year, in the same darkness and cold. In this season, we are also preparing ourselves, but it is a frantic, anxious kind of preparation for feasts and indulgence. In Advent, we wait for the coming light in quiet contemplation; during the Holidays, we string up our own lights and fill the air with noise and song.

Every year I am troubled by this tension. We can’t—and shouldn’t—ignore the Holiday season; there is much good in it. During the Holidays, we come together with family and friends; it is a time of great joy and love. But in the midst of the festivities, Advent so often gets lost. It is too easy to forget about it, to fail to take the measure of our own lives, to find moments of silence when we can be open to God’s presence.

Recently, I’ve been reading about the lectio divina, a Benedictine method of scripture reading. It is very different from how we usually read or hear biblical texts, or any texts for that matter. In the lectio, you don’t read to learn a story or to analyze a text; you read slowly, focusing on one short passage at a time. In Amazing Grace (Riverbend, 1998), poet and Benedictine oblate Kathleen Norris describes lectio divina as “a type of free-form, serious play” (277–78). In the lectio, we read and re-read as we meditate, allowing the words to speak to us in surprising ways; we pray and contemplate as God speaks and becomes present to us through his living word. This is a wonderful practice to take up during Advent. The lectio asks us to be quiet and still, to be patient with God’s word, allowing its meaning to come to us. If even in the midst of all the Holiday frenzy, we set aside a small part of every day for these kinds of devotions, we can prepare ourselves for the coming of a light that will shine into the darkness of the world.

In this issue, Nathaniel Lee Hansen recommends a source of material for this kind of reading, Sarah Arthur’s Light upon Light, a collection of poems, fiction, and suggested scripture readings selected especially for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. And in “Wide-Eyed and Wilde,” Joel Kurz suggests reading the fairytales of Oscar Wilde as a way to be reminded of basic Christian ideals of humility, selflessness, and sacrificial love.

Reading need not always be a solitary practice. Norris describes the silence of lectio divina as “a good, healthy, open silence, a freeing silence that might lead a person anywhere” (282). The silence of lectio is a leading silence that frees us from our expectations about what the Scriptures should mean; it leads us to see ourselves and those around us—those we love—in a new light. In “Campus Conversations about Sexuality and the Church,” Martha Greene Eads describes another approach to reading, one that has helped a community engage in respectful discussion about painful, divisive issues. After controversy emerged over a Christian university’s employment practices toward gay and lesbian persons, members of the university community began a semester-long initiative to read and discuss accounts of gay Christians who have struggled to find their places in the Church. They could not know where this project might lead them, whether it would help resolve the matter or exacerbate divisions, but they agreed to read and talk and learn together.

So in this busy season take time to read, to learn, to be surprised. When the Holiday season makes us anxious and busy, like Martha distracted by her many tasks, we must remember, like Mary who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened, to let our restless hearts be led to the rest that is found only in the God of peace, whose Advent we await.

                                                            —JPO