New York Times Op-Ed: Putting the Poetry Back in Christmas, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year)):
Having a conversation with Malcolm Guite is one of the richest and most pleasurable human experiences to be had. An accomplished writer, Anglican priest, musician and life fellow at Girton College of the University of Cambridge, Guite embodies a particularly British style of warmth and coziness. As we spoke, he pulled out a pipe, filled it with tobacco and puffed thoughtfully while reciting the verses of various poets from memory. If you took Bilbo Baggins, combined him with Gandalf, then threw in a dash of rock star and spiritual muse, you’d get someone like Guite.
One of my favorite collections of poetry is his 2015 book “Waiting on the Word,” which focuses in part on Advent, a Christian liturgical season that begins four Sundays before Christmas. As Christians around the world begin our third week of Advent, I spoke to Guite about this church season, his work and the revelatory power of poetry. …
Why is Advent important to you?
I think the first thing to understand is the wisdom that is embedded in the liturgical calendar and that way of sacralizing time. Advent is meant to be to Christmas what Lent is to Easter. It’s always been the wisdom of the church to have a fast before a feast, to have this time of holding back and restraint so that you really appreciate and understand the reasons for the joy and the feasting when it comes.
The word Advent means “arrival” or “coming.” The church saw that preparing for the coming of Christ at Christmas could also be a way of looking to that larger hope, which is the final coming of Jesus, the day when, at last, the earth will be filled with the glory of God. And in my book I said, well, I think there’s a third “coming,” a kind of continuous coming. We all experience a series of Advents. My prayer life and spirituality are very much focused on the Eucharist. So for me, every time I hold out my hands and the wafer is placed there and I receive him, that’s an advent. And in fact, that’s actually also Christmas. It’s an incarnation. He chooses the humble form of the bread as he chose the humble form of the baby to be his body.
Christmas became very thoroughly commercialized, and shops realized that they could use it to sell more goods, so they competed with one another to be the first ones to mention Christmas. Then the entire period of Advent was swamped with kind of trivial fling and bling, and everybody’s calendars filled up. Instead of being quieter and more reflective, then finally experiencing what G.K. Chesterton called the “submerged sunrise of wonder” at the birth of the Christ Child, we were suddenly assailed on all sides by commercial pressures.
But we can resist it. We can create rituals at home and inward spaces and times of reading that protect a certain space against all of that. Not because we’re against light and parties. You really want the light and the parties when they come, but you also want, spiritually, the contrast.
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Other New York Times op-eds by Tish Harrison Warren:
- Want To Get Into The Christmas Spirit? Face The Darkness (Dec. 22, 2019)
- Why You Should Give Your Money Away Today (Dec. 22, 2019)
- Why We Need To Start Talking About God (Aug. 29, 2021)
- What I Believe About Life After Death (Oct. 24, 2021)
- Thanksgiving, Gratitude, And The Shocking Privilege Of Life (Nov. 26, 2021)
- I’m Not Ready For Christmas (Dec. 12, 2021)
- What Mary Can Teach Us About The Joy And Pain Of Life (Dec. 19, 2021)
- 10 New Year’s Resolutions That Are Good For The Soul (Jan. 9, 2022)
- Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services (Feb. 6, 2022)
- How Faith Communities Can Respond To The Opiod Crisis (Feb. 20, 2022)
- Grief And Covid Stole My Love Of Reading. Here’s How I Got It Back. (Feb. 27, 2022)
- Ash Wednesday Forces Us To Confront Death, But It Also Offers Hope (Mar. 6, 2022)
- We’re All Sinners, And Accepting That Is Actually A Good Thing (Mar. 13, 2022)
- Three Habits To Keep After The Pandemic Ends (Apr. 3, 2022)
- Tim Keller: How A Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jesus’ Death And Resurrection Mean More (Apr. 17, 2022)
- How To Cultivate Joy Even When It Feels In Short Supply (May 8, 2022)
- We’re In A Loneliness Crisis: Another Reason To Get Off Our Phones (May 22, 2022)
- Curing The Political Polarization Destroying America With Humility And Joy (May 29, 2022)
- Uvalde Needs Our Prayers (June 12, 2022)
- I Married The Wrong Person, And I’m So Glad I Did (June 26, 2022)
- Dobbs, Roe and the Myth of ‘Bodily Autonomy’ (June 26, 2022)
- How Churches Can Do Better At Responding To Sexual Abuse (July 3, 2022)
- Do Christians Have A Moral Duty To Tweet? (July 17, 2022)
- A Model For An Evangelical Christianity Committed To Justice (Aug. 14, 2022)
- The God I Know Is Not A Culture Warrior (Aug. 21, 2022)
- Why The Christian Music Of Rich Mullins Endures, 25 Years After His Death (Oct. 9, 2022)
- Why Religious Freedom Matters, Even If You’re Not Religious (Oct. 16, 2022)
- How To Keep The Sabbath And Fight Back Against The Inhumanity Of Modern Work (Oct. 30, 2022)
- Black, Christian And Transcending The Political Binary (Nov. 6, 2022)
- Even Your Political Enemies Deserve A Slice Of Thanksgiving Pie (Nov. 24, 2022)
- Shopping And Isaiah 6:5 (Dec. 4, 2022)
- 303 Creative, Gay Rights, And Religious Freedom (Dec. 11, 2022)
