Rowan Williams, with a characteristically beautiful meditation on how God repairs us and the world in the new issue of Plough:

The incarnation of the Word of God opens up the central reality of what we are in God’s hands. It repairs that great disease of the imagination that prompts us to fantasize about being free from the body and the passage of time, free from the constraints of what we have made of ourselves, from our promises and mutual obligation, from our sheer neediness. It is this disease of the imagination that makes us fear and despise strangers – and all the strangenesses of the world we are part of, and, not least, the stranger living within our own heart. […]

In what must be one of the oddest ideas in religious history, we come to grasp – just a bit – the extraordinary fact that for us to be in the image of God, growing up into the fullness of love and freedom and joy for which we were created, means “growing into the cradle”; being born again, as they say, not as a moment of religious consolidation but in a new beginning of grateful dependence and the acknowledgment of a hunger for the real that will be both satisfied and stimulated afresh by the constant gift of God wherever we turn. Our sin-obscured selves are repaired as we are built again into our created place and, out of that, are given the freedom to be, in our own ways and at our own level, “creators,” beings through whom the one Creator transmits life and promise. The exchange of spiritual gifts that Saint Paul so wonderfully describes in the life of the Christian community is just the tip of the iceberg, a fragment of the reality in which the entire creation lives.

R. Lucas Stamps, on how the Advent season ought to be marked more by mourning than feasting or rejoicing:

The joyful mystery of the Nativity is set against the backdrop of pain. The coming of the Lord only makes sense to a people who know what it means to wait—to a “people prepared,” as Zechariah prays in his Benedictus (Luke 1:17). Advent invites us, like righteous Simeon and faithful Anna, to wait for the consolation of Israel and the redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:25, 38). Advent is not about sappy sentimentalism, gauzy nostalgia, and cheap grace. It is about a “weary world” in desperate need of rejoicing. The land of Advent is spotted with deep valleys, impassable mountains, and crooked paths (Isaiah 40:4). As the Lord himself would remind us, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

And so, Advent welcomes our mourning. It has a place for our pain. It allows us the freedom to be honest about our losses, either through our own sins or the sins of others. It tunes our heart to sing, not only of God’s grace, but also of our sin and guilt and suffering. To be sure, we already live in the luminous reality of the first advent. No season of the year is entirely devoid of that joy. We need not pretend otherwise for some kind of pious effect. But we also live in the time between the times, in the overlap of the ages. The kingdom of Christ has been definitively inaugurated through the incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but it is not here in its full glory and felicity. We, too, wait for consolation and redemption. And in this liminal space between the two advents, we can welcome a third, “middle advent,” as many spiritual writers have articulated: the coming of Christ in our hearts through the ministry of the church and personal devotion.

The season of Advent invites us to a kind of delayed gratification. We mourn before we rejoice. We sing of our weariness and captivity before we herald “Joy to the World!” In some traditions, Advent, like Lent before Easter, is a penitential season of fasting and self-examination. Only after the long night of sorrow can we rejoice that “the dayspring from on high” has visited us (Luke 1:78). Advent reminds us that Jesus didn’t come to a people who had their stuff together. He came to a broken world longing for healing.

The whole piece is worth your time. I do worry that the cultural pressures of the season (i.e., to consume, to celebrate, to gratify one’s desires) will overwhelm the ascetic impulse required to observe Advent in the way Stamps describes. And I very much include myself in that worry.

“Hit Me With Your Best Shot” came on at Chuy’s this evening while our family enjoyed some Tex-Mex. When Kristyn divulged the artist’s name to our children, our eight-year-old (Lily) thought she said “Pat Minotaur.” (She likely has Minotaurs on the brain since we’ve learned some about Crete and King Minos and all that as part of our study of ancient history.) I knew we couldn’t be the first humans to stumble upon that combination and, sure enough, one Google search turned up several results, including this photographic print.

Currently reading: The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin J. Vanhoozer 📚

Apropos of nothing: I’m most of the way through The Half-Blood Prince (this is my first time through the Harry Potter series) and I finally know what a horcrux (!!!) is. I’m now contemplating how I might lock myself away, shirk all responsibilities (work, family, etc.), and read until I’m done with Deathly Hollows.

The Division of the Light from the Darkness (1924) by Paul Nash, which I stumbled upon while perusing the (incredible) Visual Commentary on Scripture, a free online resource that, according to its About page, “provides theological commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art. It helps its users to (re)discover the Bible in new ways through the illuminating interaction of artworks, scriptural texts, and commissioned commentaries.” You really should do yourself a favor and check it out.

Brad East, in an essay on “the ends of theological education,” describing how one end is to “induct” students into the ongoing conversation that just is Christian tradition:

Theology is a conversation, a continuing consultation (in the phrase of Robert Jenson). It runs from Adam to Eschaton, and God’s own entrance in the dialogue through Israel, Christ, and Church is the opposite of a conversation-stopper. The infinite vitality of God’s eternal Word, incarnate in Israel’s Messiah, means our talk with God and about God will have no end, either in this life or in the life to come.

The proximate end of theological education is therefore to induct students into this ongoing conversation. Theological teaching has succeeded, at least in part, when students have learned to speak Christian, at least in part.

Parade Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) from Robert Frank’s The Americans

There is a light
Bright star shining
In the dark night
Old tales come true