Image: Where the Question Is Born © Jan Richardson
After I scanned today’s collage door and uploaded it to my blog, ready to sort through some of what I’d been pondering while creating it, I suddenly thought, Hm, aren’t those Mardi Gras colors? A quick online search brought the information that the traditional colors of Mardi Gras—purple, green, and gold—symbolize justice, faith, and power. Mardi Gras (French for “Fat Tuesday”) is, of course, the festival that precedes the season of Lent. Its name refers to the practice of consuming all the tasty fat-containing foods in the house before entering into what has traditionally been a season of fasting. In many places around the world, Mardi Gras is a period of intense celebration, part of an ancient, cross-cultural impulse to seek balance: between plenty and lack, play and work, festal time and ferial time.
The colors that emerged in today’s door got me thinking about Lent and its resonance with the season of Advent. While the church calendar cleanly divides the year into liturgical seasons that have their unique emphases, they also have points of connection and commonality. Ordinary Time still contains the occasional feast day, the high holy seasons still have their moments of ordinariness, liturgical colors and symbols sometimes make their appearance in more than one season. Purple, a color symbolizing both royalty and penitence, accompanies us through Lent; recognizing Advent’s resonance with Lent, the church has often used purple during Advent as well (though some congregations use blue to distinguish the season).
Advent and Lent are both seasons of preparation. Their scriptures and symbols engage us with the events leading to crucial moments in the life of the incarnate God: birth, death, resurrection. Advent and Lent contain a world of wisdom about how to live into the vast mysteries that come with being people of Emmanuel, God-with-us. How do we wrestle with the questions that get stirred up by the stories of a God who went through birth and death and resurrection? How do we carry the questions that arise from the births and deaths and resurrections that occur and recur in our own lives and in the lives of those we journey with?
In her lovely, you-should-buy-it-for-Advent-if-you-don’t-already-have-it book The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming, Wendy Wright passes along an observation from the novice master of a Trappist monastery she once visited: “To be a Christian does not mean knowing all the answers; to be a Christian means being willing to live in the part of the self where the question is born.”
Advent and Lent are seasons for mindfully entering the mysteries, for giving particular attention to the part of ourselves where questions are born. These seasons each remind us that we don’t have to figure out the mysteries all at once. We journey into them, we work at them (and let them work on us) day by day, we spiral back around them year by year. We recognize that each season contains its own measure of birth and death and rising again.
Advent beckons us to remember that even as we anticipate birth, we are challenged to let go; to make way for what is coming, we give up whatever would hinder us from receiving it. Sounds a lot like Lent. And sounds a lot like our whole lives. One of the gifts of the liturgical seasons is that they invite us to give particular focus to the stuff that surfaces all along our path.
What questions are you carrying in this season? How are birth and death and resurrection intertwined for you in these days? Is there any letting go you need to do, that new life can find a place to take hold in you?
Happy AdLent to you.
[To use the image “Where the Question Is Born,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
An Illuminated Joy
December 5, 2007 at 10:01 am |
Thanks for the AdLent meditation. I’ve often coupled the two together, but you do it so well. John C has been an encourager for me to ask questions. I come from a history of trying to “know and figure out all the right answers” and I find it so refreshing and real to say I don’t know, and it’s okay to be there. So many scriptures have those mysteries and you bring us to that place again. It’s okay. Let go and “be willing to live in the part of the self where the question is born”. I must give myself Wendy’s book for Christmas!