Dear Friends,
Clergy are notorious bibliophiles. We buy books. We are given books as gifts. And we inherit books from older priests or their surviving spouses. We read a lot of the books that we have – or at least parts of them. The rest of the books serve as backdrops in our offices; as we sit in front of them, they make us appear more learned than perhaps we really are. Back in the day, clergy had “studies” where they read and contemplated. One of the gifts my father gave me after I was ordained was a hand-carved wooden sign that reads, “Parson’s Study.” Now, more often than not, we clergy have “offices,” suggesting that what we do is more managerial than it is pastoral. Since words matter, the change in terminology is worth pondering.
Over the last several years, I’ve drastically reduced my library. Part of the reason is that I move every year or two, and books are heavy! Part of the reason is that I no longer kid myself that I’m going to read or refer to most of them. The books I have kept are the ones I go back to again and again.
Every Advent, I take one particular book down from the shelf and read an excerpt from it every day. The book’s title is Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. Just like Advent calendars, Watch for the Light gives me something to open every day – short pieces by some of the great spiritual writers. Some are from the distant past, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux and John Donne, and some are from more recent times, like Kathleen Norris and Madeleine L’Engle.
One of my favorites is by J.B. Phillips called “The Dangers of Advent.” Phillips was an Anglican clergyman and a pioneering Bible translator best known for his The New Testament in Modern English, a translation that had its start during World War II, while he was vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd in London. He found the young people in his church did not understand the King James Version of the Bible, so he used the time he spent in the bomb shelters during the London Blitz to begin a translation of the New Testament into modern English.
Here’s how “The Dangers of Advent” begins: “By far the most important and significant event in the whole course of human history will be celebrated, with or without understanding, at the end of this season, Advent. The towering miracle of God’s visit to this planet on which we live will be glossed over, brushed aside or rendered impotent by over-familiarity.”
Further on the in article, he continues, “The particular danger which faces us as Christmas approaches is unlikely to be contempt for the sacred season, but nevertheless our familiarity with it may easily produce in us a kind of indifference.”
Indifference due to over-familiarity. I don’t know if that’s a problem for you. I know it sometimes is for me. So I count on J.B. Phillips to remind me every Advent that the coming of Jesus at Christmas is – in his words – a “towering miracle.”
“The Dangers of Advent” is too long a piece for me to include here. So, in addition to the brief snippets I’ve already shared, let me close this Dear Friends letter with the words Phillips uses to close his article. He writes: “. . . behind all our fun and games at Christmastime, we should not try to escape a sense of awe, almost a sense of fright, at what God has done. We must never allow anything to blind us to the true significance of what happened at Bethlehem so long ago. Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet.”
We live on a visited planet. What an extraordinary thing to realize! I can’t possibly become overly familiar with the idea, or indifferent to it either. How about you?
Blessings,
Stephen Applegate