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Advent is here! Once again, I am mindful of the opportunity this brief ‘season’ provides for spiritual reflection and growth. Of course, this is an opportunity that is easy to miss or overlook, given how busy most of us tend to be as we prepare for Christmas and the New Year.

As I did last year, I commend once again Eugene Peterson as an Advent companion. This time, in addition to his fine book on John’s Revelation, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, I am recommending his shorter book on the letters to the seven churches that are found in Revelation. It is titled, This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be.

Those who attend or who have been shaped by the experience of worship in a liturgical church may be aware of the paradox presented to us by the current Church season. Whereas the culture around us anticipates the “end” of the year, liturgical calendars mark this week as the beginning of a new one. This month includes the darkest day in the northern hemisphere and the start of a period of colder months for many. Yet, it is also our time for celebrating the light that has come into the darkness and, with the solstice, the beginning of a new series of months leading up to the day with the longest hours of daylight.

Peterson’s The Hallelujah Banquet begins with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” in his Four Quartets:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Part of the paradox we may experience at this time of the year is prompted by our ambiguous use of the English word, end. With this word, we speak both of the termination of something, as well as its point of fulfillment. Perceiving this helps make sense of how an ‘end’ can be a place from which we also start. What is the end of the human person, a philosopher might ask. To which that same thinker might respond, the end of the human person is to be happy, and live in peaceful coexistence with others. Perceiving our ‘true end’ can help us not only to keep in mind where we are headed, but can better help us get there.

If adding another book to our reading list is more than we can imagine doing at the moment, I have a suggestion for an Advent thought project – a project that might lead a person to write three or four tight paragraphs by the end of this new month. Consider composing, and then writing, your own obituary! After first thinking of any accomplishments or points of satisfaction that may lie in our past, such an exercise will likely involve some musing on how we are not meeting, or may have fallen short of, previously identified hopes and goals. In writing our own obituary, we can do this: identify and now begin to live toward what we hope honestly can be said about us, and about how we have used our time, energies, and resources, along with others.

The central question in such an exercise is not so much about how I wish to be remembered, and is more about toward what end I now wish to live.

No matter what, whether we do some intentional reading and/or writing, or not, I encourage noticing and then remembering a feature found in both John’s Gospel and in John’s Revelation. It is the use of the present tense. In John, Jesus says, “… whoever believes has eternal life.” Has, not will have. And in the Revelation, God declares, “Behold, I make all things new…” I make, not I will make. For as God says, at the conclusion of that last book in the Bible, “… I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.”

One compelling theme in Peterson’s, This Hallelujah Banquet, is this focus on the present reality of God’s transforming work in the world, and in our lives. Of course, we might object with words to this effect: “but how can this be real, since I don’t see or feel like it is happening!” Yet, in time, the eyes of faith come to see the light in the darkness, and how the end can also be a beginning.

 

The quote from John’s Gospel is from 6:47, and the quotes from Revelation are from 21:5-6