Several years ago I began incorporating the poetry and fiction of past writers into my devotional readings for Advent. I was tired of the same cycle of resources that had guided my spiritual formation for years. Also the rise of social media had trained my brain to focus on the immediate, the urgent. So I began to hunt for something more lasting.
Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is particularly suited for reading great books; and it is likewise suited for prayer and reflection. We find ourselves more and more indoors, ever in shadow, our bodies slowing to the rhythm of the sleeping woodlands. Silence for reading and reflection is not hard to find.
And yet crashing into the midwinter quiet comes the most frantic event of the cultural year. Perhaps it is our fear of stillness, of quiet, that drives us to anything but the “silent night” of Christmas: We do not want to know what we might discover in reflection. More likely it is a consumer economy that thrives on a relentless pace. Slow and contemplative people are not shopping people; silence does not sell.
So the one time of year that we are given to pause and seek the One who seeks us becomes the one time of year that drives us nearly to self-extinction. And it is this season when we are often least likely to pick up a book and read. Who has time for that? But it is a Word that has come to us, and words that tell the story of that Word from generation to generation.
Each Advent, like the people and poets of God that have gone before us, we can speak of a bigger story, the eternal Word of God that outlasts us all.
Sarah Arthur is an editor of literary guides to prayer from Paraclete Press, including Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, from which these devotions are adapted (©2014 by Sarah Arthur, used by permission). Her forthcoming book, with coauthor Erin Wasinger, is The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us (Brazos Press).
