I: Sunday, December 3rd

first advent sunday reflections

Oh, that You would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at Your presence— as when a forest catches fire, as when fire makes a pot to boil— to shock Your enemies into facing You, make the nations shake in their boots!

- Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Prophet Isaiah

With each week’s Advent reflection, I’ll share an accompanying seven song playlist.

Advent is a liturgical season for this world.

A time to grieve, wonder, despair, long, ache. It is a season for those who spend days consumed with wrath, wishing the small group of evildoers that hold captive this world would either fall to their knees in repentance or meet their end. A time for those who know civility is Satan’s weak mocking of solidarity. A clarion call to those who desire to beat all weapons into plowshares, but still know when to bring not peace, but a sword. Advent pulls back the veil, showing us that the end is within sight — and asking: will the impending apocalypse (ie: revelation) be barbarism or eucatastrophe?

This winter has been gutting. The horror Israel (with funding, weapons, and approval from the United States) is inflicting during this ever-escalating genocide in occupied Palestine is beyond language. Death has always stalked alongside the ambition of Empire. More and more, Death appears to lead the charge, teeth bared, snarling.

We are not impotent though, and the world is not yet lost.

As Gazans show us their lives, their deaths, their struggle, their resistance, their love — a shift is occurring. Contradictions sharpen. More people are awaking. The exponential growth in solidarity alongside the increasing boldness in action assures me: we will see a free Palestine, and the resistance of Palestine “is the tip of the spear that steers us all toward liberation.”

Advent holds the contradictions out to us. In the thick winter darkness, we see glimmers and glimpses of something other: the gestating promise of deliverance; the broken, buried seed; a miracle among us and for us. My faith instructs me that God can be found in the world’s most unlikely places: a lowly manger, a tender child, a fleeing refugee, an executed prisoner, an unassuming gardener. Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? The answers we desire are already here, even if emergent. What holds us back?

“…the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food — a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities — there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you.

Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.”¹

Advent testifies to the prefiguration of that future world we long for — another world isn’t just possible, it is among us.

On October 7th, as a rupture emerged in the death-order of Empire. At the same time, Stevie and I were at Atlanta’s Radical Book Fair. There, we found (and couldn’t help buying) a collection of crossword puzzles that were created with themes from anarchist history and theory. One puzzle we recently completed solved for a succinct definition of direct action: in so far as one is able, proceed as if the State does not exist.

Where Santas loot box stores, where neighbors share food, where organizers shut down the rails and ships of war, where people act as if we are all already free, we find this world. More captivating, more irresistible by the day.

May our Advent ignore, resist, and destroy the shackles of this world’s Empire.

1. from David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology