Advent: 30 November 2022
Welcome to this year’s Advent Calendar.
Every day from now until Christmas Day, an email will bring you a new window in this Advent Calendar, opening on to words, music, art and more to help us reflect on the Christmas story. Previous Advent calendars from the Chaplaincy have had different lenses with which to focus on the narratives – Scotland, the environment, photographs of places I’ve visited, and St Andrews itself. This year I thought, as there are 26 days from today, St Andrew’s Day, until Christmas Day itself, we might use the happy coincidence that there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, and have an Advent A to Z. And appearing in the calendar each day will be quotations. Since beginning in ministry I have recorded quotations from my reading – lines, paragraphs and poems – which somehow struck me as encapsulating wisdom or humour on interesting subjects. And the box of cards has helped illuminate countless sermons given in Elgin, Dublin, St Monans, Largoward, St Andrews and wherever else I’ve preached. This summer, our Chaplaincy intern Plum digitised these quotations, or in other words typed them into a searchable, and cut & pastable document. This resource will illuminate our A to Z.
Today, A is for… Advent. Advent is the Christian season from the fourth Sunday before Christmas until 25 December. It’s a time to consider what it means for God to come to creation, in all our mixed-up beauty. And it’s a time of waiting, for the annual return of the nativity. Here is a beautiful meditation by Annie Dillard of waiting, from her classic book of observing nature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face. They thundered across the pond, and back, and back again: I swear I have never seen such speed, such single-mindedness, such flailing of wings. They froze the duck pond as they flew; they rang the air; they disappeared. I think of this now, and my brain vibrates to the blurred bastinado of feathered bone. “Our God shall come,” it says in a psalm for Advent, “and shall not keep silence; there shall go before him a consuming fire, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred up round about him.” It is the shock I remember. Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.
A is also of course for… Andrew, the disciple of Jesus whose name is borne by the town and University of St Andrews. Today is St Andrew’s Day, and the University is marking this by holding graduation ceremonies in the morning and afternoon. At 9.30 am we will hold a Service of Thanksgiving for Graduation in St Salvator’s Chapel at which we’ll hear a graduand read a passage in the Bible with the final mention of Andrew by name, on the day Jesus ascended. But tradition records many further acts of this apostle, including his death by crucifixion on an X-shaped cross, in Patras, Achaea in Greece. Perhaps he too could have said: You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.
This image of Andrew being bound to his cross is from the Lower Belvedere Museum in Vienna, which we visited this summer.
All are welcome at the service, which will also be livestreamed and available thereafter here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/chaplaincy/worship/
I hope you enjoy this year’s Advent Calendar from A to Z. Feel free to reply to me ([email protected]) with comments, queries and your own reflections.
With all good wishes for Advent,
Yours,
Donald.